What about the pact between two brothers who know they’re going to die early, after they get thrown right away into the most traumatic bloodbath battle-as-massacre of the war. But they get separated right away, and one of them gets sent to be a frontline commander on the fields of battle where his men keep being sent into charnelhouse after charnelhouse with the line barely ever meaningfully moving. And the other gets sent to the central city planet, cut off from the rest of the galaxy, being radicalized against his brothers and acting as some combination of slave/cop/security for the politicians and the wealthy who would never get their hands dirty with war.
WHAT IF THEYRE ALL COGS IN THE MACHINE BUT THEY CANT SEE IT YET MAYBE CAN’T SEE IT EVER YOU CAN’T SEE THE FOREST FROM INSIDE THE TREES YOU CANT SEE THAT YOURE BOTH PART OF THE SYSTEM UNTIL YOURE STEPPING OUT BECAUSE ITS FALLING DOWN! WARS IN FAILING HEGEMONIC DEMOCRACIES SLIDING TOWARDS DICTATORSHIP ARE PLAYGROUNDS FOR THE RICH AND WE ARE BEING CHURNED UNDER THEIR BOOTS! ITS ALL SYMPTOMS OF ONE SICKNESS! WE ARE STANDING ON OPPOSITE SIDES OF A WALL THAT IS ACTUALLY MERELY A PARTITION WITHIN A FORTRESS! YOU CANNOT ESCAPE
And what about when they order you to shoot your brother’s brother, who should be yours, too, and you comply?? Are you still brothers, have you become something else?? Has the machine eaten you? Is there a difference between being inside it and becoming it? Will you hold your fire long enough to ask yourself that question ?