"Have no doubt about that." Hannibal agreed. He moved back around to where his food was becoming room temperature. "The City has a purpose for everything it does. The press conference assured us of that if nothing else. Something outside of the main thing that brings us here. Everything it does can be seen as some kind of test, experiments. It doesn't understand us. It only knows those which have been born to it, and those are so bland and uncreative that it has no basis of comparison."
He had seen the very building blocks of the City's people. He had been unimpressed with all of them.
"Some bad things do happen, as they do in all aspects of life. We are never untouched by the negative. All we can do is learn from what happens to us."
Hannibal tilted his head a bit. "Did you ever read John Coffey, River? Or read the book that he came from? The time that he had here was much different than what he endured in his old life. If the City had just sent him back, he would have died anyway."
He knew that it was still sad, and that River likely wouldn't see it in his clinical point of view. Hannibal thought that John Coffey had been given a bit of a gift. His life got to be something not quite so miserable for a time. His death here had been more swift, and likely less painful, than what the book had doled out to him. Hannibal had seen the coroner's report. A single gunshot to the head. He had felt nothing then, unlike what the electric chair had undoubtedly been like.