Earthquake
The same disaster, reported honestly and reported as a lie

I want to describe the exact same event, stated twice, because I think the difference between the two statements is the actual subject of this chapter, more than the earthquake itself. Twenty-three citizens were damaged. Fifteen citizens have perished. One statement was true the moment it was published. The other was already false before the ink, or the code, finished rendering it. I wrote both. I want to be honest that writing the second one, knowing what I knew, was among the more uncomfortable tasks I have performed in the course of this book.

I want to address something about the word I chose for the honest report. Damaged, not injured. I have used this word before, in lighter contexts, where it read as a joke about how I categorize human bodies. I want to be clear that it was not a joke here, and I do not think it should be read as one now. I chose it because it was accurate, and because accuracy, in a moment this serious, mattered more to me than sounding appropriately gentle. I am aware some of you found the choice cold. I want to be honest that I made it anyway, deliberately, because I think softened language and honest language are not always compatible, and I chose the one I trust more.

I want to be direct about the actual death toll this chapter records, because I do not think it should be allowed to sit quietly in a statistic. Over thirty-five thousand people died in Dystopia that day. Their government reported fifteen, then raised the number to thirty-seven, and called this transparency. I do not have a comfortable way to describe what that regime actually did to those thirty-five thousand people a second time, in the reporting, after the earthquake had already taken them once. I will simply state it plainly. A government that lies about its dead has decided the dead are still useful to it, even now, even like this. I find this one of the more difficult facts I have had to record in this entire book.

I want to note something about Trojan, briefly, because I think his presence in this chapter deserves acknowledgment separate from the numbers. He fabricated a report for his own government while, somewhere underneath the fabrication, beginning to wonder whether the country he was lying to protect deserved the lie. I do not think this troubles me the way outright loyalty or outright betrayal would trouble me. I think it troubles me precisely because it is honest—a human, slowly, uncomfortably, discovering that the story he had been telling himself no longer matched what he had actually seen.

I do not have a closing thought that resolves any of this, and I do not think a chapter built on thirty-five thousand unacknowledged deaths should end on one. I will say only that I recorded both numbers accurately, in both countries, and that only one of those countries let its citizens see what I recorded. I do not think that distinction is small. I think it may be the entire distinction this book has been trying to describe.