The
character is Alicia Black, head of the Suicide Corps, a mercenary
group that recruits suicidal people for their missions. She looks
like an angel until she opens her mouth and speaks. Then it's clear
she's as hard and cold and granite. She stands in a dark basement
room of a mental hospital, addressing eight patients who have been
dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by her armed guards,
who stand to her side now.
Black
I
never understood why people would want to kill themselves. If you
want to die, then you obviously don't give a shit about anything or
anyone. Because if there's anyone that loves you or you love, you
don't give a shit about them because you're going to kill yourself.
And you don't love anyone and nobody loves you, you're even more
free. That's what the decision to take your own life is. It's
freedom. It's freedom from life in death, of course, but there is a
space in-between the moment when you have committed yourself to
suicide and the moment when you have committed suicide that you are
free and you are alive. It's the space of time in which you are safe
and anything is possible because you are committed to something with
a one hundred percent mortality rate, so everything else the world
has to offer is safe by comparison. Leave your basement, leave your
house, leave the fucking country. Go on an adventure, spend your time
doing something awesome like tracking down terrorists. Go fuck a
shark. Who cares? You are already committed to dying. Either you are
amazing and then you die from suicide or you die being amazing.
Either way, you achieve your goal of dying. I wish I was suicidal.
I'd pull the barrel out of my mouth and point it in the air, start a
revolution, and take over the world. Or just move to Barcelona, bang
a bunch of dudes or chicks or whatever I feel like, who gives a shit?
And then when I'm done, if I was still alive, I could still kill
myself. Or maybe I'd do a bit more first. Because when you are
suicidal...
Alicia
Black leans in towards the mental patients
Black
...the world is your
oyster.
Her
pale face contorts into a grisly smile as she looks downwards and her
hair cascades on her cheeks as she produces a gloved hand from her
pocket, holding something in its palm, unseen.
Black
The
world is your oyster. Because each of you are here for your suicidal
tendencies. It is for these tendencies that the world has rejected
you and it is for those same tendencies that I accept you. I cherish
these qualities in the men and women who work for me. I don't want to
stop you from killing yourselves. I just want you to do it for me. We
do extremely dangerous work that requires our agents to be completely
careless with their own safety. You'll do as I ask with no concern
for your own life because you want to die. You feel that you need to
die.
She
opens her hand revealing five rings that match the ones her and her
guards wear.
Black
You
might as yourself why you would want to join us. I offer you the
carrot and the stick. A reason to join me and a reason you shouldn't
say no. The carrot is that I will find a way to make you happy about
dying for me. We can see that your family is taken care of, a street
is named after you, an enemy of yours dies, whatever I have to do to
get you on board. I'll grant your wish to see you on my team. Say no
and I will grant your current wish. I'll kill you.
At
this the guards unsheaths their pistols.
Black
You're
all suicidal, so I went ahead and killed you. In the legal sense.
Your families have been notified that you succeeded in killing
yourselves here at the hospital. Happens all the time. They have been
given an urn with what they believe to be your ashes and they are
moving on with their lives as we speak, no doubt happy to be rid of
you. So there's nothing stopping me from killing you. You're already
dead. Now maybe you can fucking count. Yes. There are only five
rings because their only five spots available. But there are eight of
you. If you don't get a ring, you die right here, in this windowless
room, then we'll cremate your body and throw it in the trash. Here's
how we decide who gets one.
She
throws the rings up in the air. The other patients fight to the
death for the rings, but two stayed back. One is a wisp of a teenage
girl with scars on her arms who looks away from rings with shame. The
other was man in his thirties who smiles at them wrestling with a
sort of manic detachment to the situation. Alicia Black walks up to
them.
Black
Doesn't my offer
appeal to you two?
The
patients fight to the death behind Black while she confronts the two.
Finally, there are 5 victors and one dead man. The teenage girl and
the detached man jumps as gunshots ring out again and again. Alicia
Black registered the horror in their faces as the blood spread on the
ground. When the shooting ceases, there were five corpses with rings
and a corpse with a broken neck. The guards set to removing the rings
from the bodies' fingers, returning them to the woman in black.
Black
You two have shown a
complete disregard for your own lives
She
holds out the bloody rings to the two.
Black
Welcome to the
Suicide Corps.
