Elsa, Lauro and Milgram

Of all the fratello, Lauro and Elsa’s partnership was the most tragic. Their bodies were found in a forest preserve, both professionally executed with bullets to the head, so naturally the Agency thought Padania had put contracts out on all the fratello. Henrietta and I were spirited out of the city for our own safety while the investigation took place. As Section one began a private inquiry the officers wondered aloud why this young girl and older man would be together in such a secluded place.

The tragedy of Lauro and Elsa reminds me of another condition Milgram noted as necessary for suspending morality. His condition stated, “The guards (or teachers) develop a distorted sense of the victims (or learners) as not comparable to themselves. Dehumanizing them as animals would be an extreme example.” Lauro was the textbook example of this condition and treated Elsa with contempt. Although several handlers referred to the girls as cyborgs or tools when they talked among themselves, Lauro referred to Elsa as a cyborg to her face. He was cold and indifferent to her on and off the clock, never complimented her for a job well done and punished her severely if she made a mistake. Because he insisted on giving her the highest doses of conditioning, she was totally devoted to him to the point of being obsessively in love with him so his indifference seemed even crueler. Elsa reacted to this treatment by crawling into an emotional shell, isolating herself from everyone except Lauro, and exhibiting nervousness and distraction on the job. I tried to talk to him about it but he dismissed my concern and criticized my kindness toward Henrietta implying that I was a cyborg lover. His dehumanization of Elsa allowed him to justify his abusive behavior, which may have included the rumors we heard of their “playing house.” No one spoke of a sexual relationship directly, but Elsa showed psychological symptoms of abuse.

When both were murdered, the investigation centered on known Padania hit men but we found no viable suspects. A break in the case came when it was discovered that the bullet in Lauro’s brain came from Elsa’s gun. At the time we could not imagine a scenario where one of our girls, who was highly trained and conditioned to protect her handler, could have allowed her own firearm to be taken away and used to harm her handler.

Another detail was perplexing to the investigators. Elsa’s own fatal wound was a bullet, shot at close range piercing her eye, a secret Achilles heel for this generation of cyborgs. In fact the eye is the only place that isn’t armored so it is THE vulnerable place on the cyborg body. So either the shot was unusually lucky or it was an inside job.

I was a suspect because everyone knew that Lauro and I had strong philosophical differences. But I was quickly ruled out when investigators visited Henrieta and I at our seaside hideout. It was actually Henrietta who solved the case with a dramatic demonstration of the potent emotional bonds forged by chemical conditioning. She told the investigator, very softly--very sincerely, that if I had ever treated her the way Lauro treated Elsa she would have been so heartbroken that she would have killed herself. She grabbed a gun, placed it next to her eye, and fired. We rushed to stop her but she deliberately missed to illustrate her point and it showed us the solution to the crime. Elsa’s despair brought her to a place where the only solution was to kill Lauro, and then turn the gun on herself, committing suicide and ending her pain.

At first this incident caused the doctors and neurologists to rethink dosages and to caution the handlers about using too much conditioning. For a while the staff called the girls by name and stopped making off-color remarks about what they would do if they had a squad of cyborg girls at their disposal. But as the memory of the incident retreated in time it also retreated from our memories and soon we all went back to business as usual.