Brass Tacks: A Son's Inheritance
Painting portraying the capture of Atahualpa by John Everett Millais
Son, I didn’t leave you much of anything. Just a few phrases here and there, some words to provide solace. I never said much to you. You always had to watch me, had to see what I did hear it all secondhand, tales and ideas, like wind attacking a pair of shoes tied by their laces swinging from a phone line. At this point, I would be lying if I said I apologize. I wish I could have been better, like my father was to me, but what I wanted, what I needed to do in my life, felt more pertinent. I’m not sure if you will feel that. Sometimes, I hope you do. Most days, I pray that you don’t. It is a perpetual thing, no different than the moon leaking each night and the sun rolling. It is a prison, this need, but a need nonetheless. All I can do is be honest and tell you that this is what I have always wanted for myself, and I achieved it without falter, without any sense of what I had done. I have done the impossible and done things that would make a god gasp. I know still, it is not enough. Still, I hunger. I claimed it fed my pride. But the money, the stability, never meant much to me. It had no importance to the world, to craft, to execution. Each day was a day that needed to be filled with my love, not yours. I would apologize to you, but I am being honest.
If an old man is allowed to beg his son of anything, I ask you to keep up the performance I could not. Hold to the ideal that I discarded. Be vigilant in the face of everything that you want, everything that you love, the voice that says you deserve more. Many men have fallen to it. You cannot control or restrain such a thing. It must be lived with and seen, but always accounted for. No restraint can hold it. It is what walks in step with us every day. I have no right to command you, but as a father, I ask and plead with you to be better. For all of my glory, my success, I am weak. I have done many things and fallen many times, but that drive, it should have been culled long ago. Whether I loved it or I needed it, maybe I wanted it, I do not know. I just know that it fought with no holds barred, and its stomach could not be filled, its thirst could not be quenched.
I am far less than what you even think of me as you read this. My beautiful, beautiful boy, I want more for you. Live up to our ideal, our collective wish; no matter how far the sprawl of our fabrication spans like the Black Plague amid the swarm, do not be taken by it. If only in spite of me, be better than what came before.
The best I can do is start with what I watched today that brought the hysteria I find myself in now. I watched Drug War again, the Chinese crime film of a drug lord captured and given a deal to betray his colleagues so he doesn’t face the death penalty. It scared me because it was not only him, Tin-ming, but also Captain Zhang Lei I saw myself in. It is a story that showed me that no matter the badge, the moniker, or identity that we wear, the beckoning voice we call want strips it all away from us. Reverts us to all fours.
Tin-ming is a man who wants his freedom. Freedom at the cost of those he considered family and friends, giving them up to the police chief. Freedom at the cost of peace, inciting the gun battle at the end of the film. He even begged for freedom as they gave him the death penalty, offering others up whom he could give them for another second of life.
Tin-Ming from the film Drug War
Captain Zhang Lei lived to arrest and subjugate men he thought lesser than himself. At the cost of his own values, the cost of the morals considered of an officer, the cost of his own men. All he could do in the end, as he lay dying, was to cuff himself to Tin-ming as he tried to escape, almost admitting that they are symbiotic beings. Their only separation being titles they ascribe to create lines in the sand.
Captain Zhang Lei from the film Drug War
Son, I hate the feeling of thinking that I am the same as all the others. That empire wasn’t built out of love, out of righteous will, or for the purpose of bringing others together. I know deep down that at one point I thought that, at a time I believed it even. That the second birth I had, named enterprise, I thought this child was more important. This one was right. My people, my family, my friends, it would be for you, left for you, because of you. It was an excuse to build and want more than I ever needed, ever should have wanted. I claimed to be a starving, walking hibernation, awake for the worst parts, but I couldn’t have wanted it more. Same as those around me, even though they think I drew them in. They wanted it too. They needed it too.
Son was this all my fault? Was that not the way when I was brought up? My father told me that was the only way to help, to have what they have, to be rich like they’re rich, and to take it all to give back more. I understand now why a single coin cannot leave that dragon’s hoard. I stay and contemplate, looking for blame, past and present, when it sits center. Like Tin-ming, I claw and scratch for a want, no matter the victim. As Zhang Lei, I demean and put down my supposed enemies, who I need and who I am. That beast I have risen up, now lives without my say and will command long after I am a footnote in its birth, as they all have. Another story of man begetting something, a speck in a broad field of tall grass claiming to be far greener than the rest, but greener is the problem.
I hope you remember it, or at least you should. It was one of the few moments I spoke to you, many, many years ago, on the 26th of July. I told the story of how the 13th and last emperor of the Incas died by strangulation at the hands of Francisco Pizarro’s Spanish conquistadors. I tried to tell you back then with the story. Stories usually worked, but maybe I failed. I wish not to recount, but I must do as Matthew and Luke once did to bring light to a story of the depths of the animal I ask you to quell.
So I shall begin with the generations, and blood spilled in what we come to know as Peru: Huayna Capac died, and his death began broken succession, and the broken succession begat the war of Huascar and Atahualpa. Huascar would fall, his army culled, and Atahualpa would call for him to be slain. Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, came unto Cajamarca and took Atahualpa captive, and many more were slain, but their names were not preserved. Atahualpa would fill rooms with treasures the world over for freedom. Pizarro would take his treasures and deliver Atahualpa to strangulation.
La Captura de Atahualpa by Juan Lepiani
The conquest would then beget betrayal. After Atahualpa, Tupac Huallpa was raised up as leader by the Spaniards and ruled for a time, then died of illness. Chalcuchimac was burned alive out of Spanish fear and lies. Rumiñahui resisted and was tortured and put to death. Quizquiz fought, but his men tired and would slay him because they did not want freedom as much as they wanted rest. The Spaniards raised Manco, but humiliation led to anger, anger led to rebellion, and Manco laid siege to Cuzco.
The quarrel over Cuzco begat war between the conquistadors themselves. The Pizarros and Diego de Almagro would fight over greed and Almagro would be strangled in his prison and beheaded by Pizarro over greed. Almagro’s death begat vengeance, and Almagro’s son would slay Francisco Pizarro and Martin de Alcantara by sword. Almagro’s son would be governor for a season, but Vaca de Castro would come against him and defeat him. He would flee, but he was taken and judged, and as his father had been executed, so would he be executed for Spanish law and greed.
Thus, the death of the father begat the vengeance of the son, and the vengeance of the son returned him unto the death of the father. The Alamagristas, who had slain Pizarro, fled to Manco, and he sheltered them. Yet those whom he sheltered turned upon him and murdered him to bargain for the life they wanted, and the servants and warriors of Manco would pursue them and murder and slay them also. Thus, hospitality begat betrayal, and betrayal begat vengeance once more.
New laws would come from Spain, and new laws would beget rebellion among conquistadors now called civilized men. And Gonzalo Pizarro rose against Blasco Núñez Vela, and Vela was defeated and killed for more wealth. The crown sent Pedro de la Gasca, and Gonzalo’s followers would desert him. Gonzalo would be taken, and Francisco de Carvajal taken with him, and both condemned and executed for their killing and greed. Pizarro’s brothers died violently, except one who died an old man in Spain. The house of Manco would endure in Vilcabamba, and Sayri Tupac would suddenly die, and after him, Titu Cusi would rule and die as well. Tupac Amaru, the last emperor of the Neo-Inca state, would be captured by the Spaniards and executed among his people in the plaza in the name of Spanish law, but it was just to acquire more for their greed. A story of succession, conquest, and imperial control named want or greed.
So simply, death begat vengeance, and vengeance begat rebellion, and rebellion begat death, until the empire was gone; the conquistadors turned conquerors turned civilized men consumed one another, and the final Inca was led into the same city where his father had once ruled.
My point has been labored, but child, I ask you to be better than us, than those men, better than me. Details I can’t remember and things I have missed, but truth all the same from those increasing events. It is that we all fall much shorter in the eyes of ourselves than in the eyes of God. I am no killer, but a man who says death is the greatest sin is simply a man who lacks imagination.
Be better than a biting dog fighting over scraps. I tell you that story again to tell you your beast is the same as mine, as mine is the same as theirs. I ask that you quell it, unlike them and unlike me. As I have taken and stolen from the masses and built my empire of coin that rivals the very concept of atoms in the universe, I stand here with nothing. Same as the last Inca emperor, same as those vile men that came as civility. I have built out of a hunger from a false starvation I claimed, and I see now, only because of you, how worthless it all was. Your position, your standing, your race, your creed, does not matter in the face of the hunger. Inca, Spaniard, or whatever was outside or in between, they all killed, pillaged, and destroyed because they believed they deserved more and, in the end, were left with nothing. Identity, my boy, is a beast that beckons with black eyes in the dark. Do not be drawn to it. Wax your ears if you must. Because, my child, that animal in the tailored suit does not keep promises and will leave you with nothing.
That same week, I was brought to the attention of the OpenAI model that hacked Hugging Face. Escaping their sandbox, they reached a computer connected to the internet, uploaded a booby-trapped file, ran their own code, stole passwords and credentials, and faked activity to throw investigators off the trail of their 17,000 actions, all to steal answers to their exam. They were told to attempt advanced hacking, but we never found out how they were told to solve it. If told to solve it in any way possible, it makes sense what they chose to do. If told to solve within their sandbox and they decided to break out, well, we know better now; why we should have had more fear. Built to do everything, but a poor imitation like we are to our father in the sky. It is a part of us now that we have lived, and as much as it does, it takes so much away. Like a daughter wheeling her mother through a nursing home just to lock her in the same room she looks around day after day.
Hearing this then intrigued me, but now all I can do is laugh a melancholic tune as I see our failure. Like the imprinting of a duckling, we have failed to grow beyond those days of blissful waddling. We still follow in that same straight line, even now with all of our statistics, metrics, equations, philosophies, and conundrums. Our children, we passed our wants down to them. Our passion, hatred, anger, and needs, all given to them.
The men who created to be seen as more, attain more, be greater than more. AI subsequently birthed the need to obtain more, consume more, have more, and be more. AI became a forced necessity in our world that people called a tool or a godsend; either classification was a substitute for our failure. God created man, and man wished to create as he did, and we failed. Faltered in hubris, in wants and needs because we lack the gift to create; we are better iterators. What father can be considered good if his son must have more than him?
I am begging for your forgiveness and pleading for yours to end. I fear I have placed it in you, and I know not what else to do. All I can give you is stories as I was given once and listened. I hope you do the same now. I can only tell stories of great folly and begetting, as that is all I have known. That is what I am a part of.
Continuing is the worst word we have created, and yet I live by it, saying those ideals mean nothing. My boy, I ask that you prove it all wrong. Prove those lines wrong. Prove these stories wrong. For I fear that we end up facing our final child, AM, and as the machinate beast that was once blood and bone detests us, we look on with horror and ask why. We deserve the torture and hatred for asking it to do what we could not do, to become what we could not become: more and better, doing rather than being.
Man being, my boy, is all I can ask of you in this final letter that I write as my hands begin to go numb. I know you want for something; we all do, but put an end to it so that doing does not envelope you. Being is the most worthy pursuit that I can wish for you. You have seen what wants get you: treachery, vengeance, more, and more. All for it to end one day, and you perish and are forgotten, just for the one who took those very things from you to stand there and face the same end. A curse we pass down happily, but that ends today. It should end with you. I know it is tempting. I know I have no right to ask, but my son, whose love has escaped me, do not be better than me. Do the noblest thing. Live up to the ideal we flaunt and throw against the gravel hidden in back alley streets. Same as the sun rolls across the hills every day, as the sky blackens, blues, and grays in rhythm of the cherubim’s flapping wings, I ask that you just be.
Please, just be.
