<part:number=01:title=Miss.Selfdestruct/>

Harmony — LNCrawler · All chapters

HARMONY

PROJECT ITOH

Harmony
© 2008 Project Itoh
Originally published in Japan by Hayakawa Publishing Inc.

English translation © 2010 VIZ Media, LLC
Cover and interior design by Sam Elzway

No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.

HAIKASORU
Published by
VIZ Media, LLC
295 Bay Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
www.haikasoru.com

ISBN: 978-1-4215-3954-6
Haikasoru eBook edition, August 2010

CONTENTS

<part:number=01:title=Miss.Selfdestruct/>

<part:number=02:title=A Warm Place/>

<part:number=03:title=Me, I’m Not/>

<part:number=04:title=The Day the World Went Away/>

<part:number=epilogue:title=In This Twilight/>

About the Author

<part:number=01:title=Miss.Selfdestruct/>

<?Emotion-in-Text Markup Language:version=1.2:encoding=EMO-590378?>

<!DOCTYPE etml PUBLIC :-//WENC//DTD ETML 1.2 transitional//EN>

<etml:lang=jp>

<etml:lang=en>

<body>

I have a story to tell.

<declaration:calculation>

<pls: The Story of a Failure>

<pls: The Story of a Defector>

<eql: In other words, me.>

</declaration>

<theorem:number>

<i: When children become adults, they become data.>

<i: When adults die, they are liquefied.>

</theorem>

No, that’s not quite right. Better to describe it in prohibitions:

<rule:number>

<i: A child’s body should not be reduced to data until it has matured.>

<i: When an adult dies, the body should be disincorporated into liquid.>

</rule>

Children’s bodies are restless, eager. They won’t sit still, not even for a moment. An adult’s body is always moving too— moving steadily toward death—but at a far more deliberate pace.WatchMe doesn’t belong in a restless body. WatchMe doesn’t belong in the body that skips and runs. WatchMe monitors constancy, but a child grows every day. They’re changing all the time. What’s constant about that?

So,

<list:item>

<i: While my tits are still getting bigger…>

<i: While my ass is still getting bigger…>

<i: No WatchMe in me!>

<i: A body with WatchMe is an adult body.>

</list>

For a high school girl like me, growing up was the last thing I wanted to do.

“Let’s show ’em, the both of us,” Miach said one day. Miach Mihie was her full name. I sat behind her in class. While everyone was getting ready to go home, she turned around in her chair and leaned over my desk.

“We’ll make a declaration, together: we’ll never grow up.”

<list:item>

<i: our bodies>

<i: our tits>

<i: our pussies>

<i: our uteruses>

</list>

“These things are ours. That’s what we’ll tell them. We’ll whisper it at the top of our lungs!”

Yeah, me and Miach were the weird kids.

In a world of kind, thoughtful, group-consciousness types, we might not have been entirely on our own, but we sure felt like it.

<declaration>

<i: We won’t become them.>

</declaration>

Part of a whole world practically tripping over itself not to offend others, to be thoughtful of others—even of me.

“Hey, Tuan, you know what?” Miach’s eyes sparkled. Miach knew everything. Of all the delinquents in our class, she had the best grades. Miach never spoke to anyone besides me and Cian—Cian Reikado, our other friend—unless it was absolutely necessary.

I still don’t know what Miach saw in us. I didn’t get very good grades, and while I wasn’t ugly I wasn’t particularly attractive either. The same went for Cian. Sometimes I wondered why she hung out with us at all, but I never asked. Not once.

“A long time ago, there were men who would actually pay to have sex with a couple of innocent bodies like ours. So all these girls who weren’t even poor would sell themselves as fuck toys, and they wouldn’t even feel guilty about it at all. And neither would the morally depraved men who bought them. They’d meet up in hotels and pay them cash.”

“What?” I said, giggling. “You want to sell your body?” The way Miach was talking, she sounded like she would be off for the nearest red-light district right then if she could—that is, had they still existed anymore. There, a little girl could be as depraved as she wanted to be. She could throw away her whole life, destroy her body with loveless sex, diseases, alcohol, recreational drugs, and cigarettes.

Plague, booze, and smokes—loot too good to pass up.

You couldn’t find any of these things in Japan, a nation obsessed with health, or anywhere else under admedistration rule, for that matter. All these vices, things which had gone more or less ignored in the past, had been carved into a list of sins by the all-powerful hand of medicine, and one by one, they had been purged from society.

“If there were still men of that caliber of depravity around today, maybe growing up wouldn’t be as bad as it sounds. But there aren’t.”

She had a point. Had the streets been filled with people secure in their own perversion, then maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t hate school and pretty much everything else so much. But the world kept getting healthier and more wholesome, more peaceful, more beautiful, and just depressingly good. Have a little selfrespect, you might tell it, but I doubt the world would care.

<declaration:anger>

<“We don’t know what rock bottom is like. And they wouldn’t let us know, even if we tried.”>

</declaration>

Miach’s favorite line.

Miach knew everything. For example:

<list:item>

<i: How to tweak a medcare unit to convert medicules into a chemical weapon capable of killing a city of fifty thousand people.>

<i: How to trick a medcare unit into making small amounts of feel-good endorphins.>

</list>

“Medcare units are these magic boxes,” she told me once. “All you need is a half tank of medicules and you can do just about anything. Want to fill a bathroom with poison gas? Beyond easy.”

Telling us in gory detail about the many dangers of medcare units was one of Miach’s favorite things to do. Even a residential medcare unit was highly adaptable. All it had to do was download a recipe and it could throw together a compound to generate just the right kind of medicules you needed to take care of any illness. It was like a magic hand that reached in and crushed disease. To Miach the ramifications of this were obvious: flip a switch, and the medcare unit would go from good to evil, from panacea to plague. The only thing keeping people from doing it was the medcare unit telling them they couldn’t. All that stands between us and Armageddon is a little bit of coding, she’d say. Turn one little routine on its head, and you could overturn the world. It all came down from the top. The admedistration checked your WatchMe data in order to download the right information to the medcare unit in your home, which would then produce the necessary substances to fight whatever was ailing you.

“Think of the billions of people in the world under constant WatchMe surveillance, consuming whatever their medcare unit pumps out. Take control of the system, and you could slam every last one of them with some nasty, incurable disease. Or worse.

“It’s just a matter of wanting to do it,” Miach would say.

When she wasn’t talking to us, Miach would sit on a bench in a park where the local children played and quietly read books. Reading text on dead-tree media was her only hobby, as far as we could tell. I asked her once why she bothered with books when she could just call up the same thing in augmented reality on the net.

“When you want some real solitude, dead-tree media’s the only way to go. Then it’s just the two of us. Me and the medium,” was Miach’s answer. She went on in that cool, silky smooth, soporific voice of hers. “It works with movies and paintings too. But a book will give you the most persistence by far.”

“What do you mean, ‘persistence’?”

“The persistence of solitude.”

So Miach would download the text she wanted from the Borgesnet and go to a printer who would make her an actual physical copy. Places that printed books for hobbyists weren’t easy to come by, but you could still find them if you looked. The majority of Miach’s spending money went to book-making, and she probably had her hobby to thank for her formidable store of knowledge.

She spent her days swimming through a sea of letters, searching for something to give her that edge she wanted.

“I have to think I’m pretty sharp by now,” she was fond of saying.

I didn’t need to ask what she meant.

She was honing herself to be the perfect public enemy. A vicious attack dog, dreaming of the day she could take on the whole so-stifling-sweet-it-felt-like-it-was-choking-you-with-a-silken-thread world.

“So what I’m saying is, if a few people had the inclination, they could kill everyone in Japan—” she snapped her fingers— “like that. It’s just a matter of wanting to.”

“But you can’t just kill people,” Cian would say, but her words seemed flimsy in the face of Miach’s conviction. Or maybe that was just my resentment talking—resentment that I had never even thought about whether you shouldn’t do such a thing, or why.

Maybe:

<list:item>

<i: Because I have a father.>

<i: Because I have a mother.>

<i: Because I have friends.>

</list>

Could be. But take away the family, and the only people I could call my friends were Miach, who had suggested we make poison gas with a residential medcare unit, and Cian, who never suggested much of anything.

“There’s a difference between wanting to do something and wanting to do something like that,” I said with a grin.

Miach smiled back. “Wanting to do something horrible, that’s right. By the time we’re adults, just thinking about things like this will be a crime.”

“Nobody’s going to come and arrest you just for thinking something.”

“I’m not talking about police. I’m talking about a crime in our hearts, our souls.”

Miach reached out and grabbed one of my breasts.

My left breast. The breast closest to my heart.

My eyes went wide as Miach started squeezing my breast hard, her face serious as she spoke. Next to us, Cian sat there, gaping.

“When this breast has gotten as big as it’s going to get, we’ll all have WatchMe inside us.”

Miach’s fingers squeezed my nipple so hard I thought it would pop. She wanted me to feel the pain.

“A regiment of medicules inside you, watching you, snitching on you. Little nanoparticles turning our bodies into what? Into data. They reduce our physical state to medical terminology and hand the information, our bodies, over wholesale to some well-meaning admedistration bureaucrat.”

“Miach, p-please!”

Ignoring me, she went on, “Could you stand that happening to you, Tuan?”

“What I can’t stand is what your hand is doing to me right now!”

But Miach kept squeezing and smiling. “Do you think you could stand letting them replace your body with data? I know I couldn’t.”

≡

Miach first discovered me in the park.

Some parents were playing with their kids on a warped pink jungle gym, and there she was, a girl my age, sitting on a bench reading a book. I had seen her in class, so I knew who she was. Everyone knew who she was.

Spooky.

That was what they called her. A lot of the cliques in school, girls and boys alike, had approached her in the beginning—her grades alone meant she stood out—but she managed to remain unaffiliated, preferring a beautiful kind of solitude.

Some of the groups misunderstood and took pity on her. Not that I blamed them for not getting Miach. Everyone was so concerned about everyone else as it was. And with goodwill toward men the norm of the day, it was hard to imagine anyone who didn’t want to take part in all that. So the girls would invite her over to eat lunch with them, or want to text with her, all trying to get her attention.

We were taught to be kind to one another, to support one another, to live in harmony. That was what it meant to be adult, they said.

<list:item>

<i: Love thy neighbor.>

<i: Turn the other cheek.>

</list>

That was how we were told to be. That was how everyone had to be, from East to West, after the Maelstrom.

<list:item>

<i: freedom>

<i: charity>

<i: equality>

</list>

This was the society Miach hated. Parents couldn’t choose their children, but children didn’t get to choose anything. “I would have at least liked to pick the world I have to live in,” Miach used to say. When the other boys and girls at school approached her, she refused them politely at first. If they kept pushing, she would say something like “I’m not interested in mere humans,” and that would usually settle things.

She was like Princess Kaguya turning away potential suitors on the grounds that they weren’t from the moon or couldn’t pluck a jewel from a dragon’s neck. This flat-out refusal to associate with anyone worked like a charm. She didn’t leave even the starry-eyed would-be fans any room for interpretation. Of course, if she really meant what she said, that would mean that Cian and I weren’t “mere humans.” It occurred to me that maybe I should have been upset about that.

The upshot was that I never felt like I fit in at school and tried to spend most of my time holed up at home, though I did somehow get dragged into one group or another during my years there. I like to think of that as my last vestige of societal behavior. I tried to hide in plain sight, praying that no one would call on me to do anything in our extracurricular activities, thoroughly weary of the kindness of friends.

<declaration>

</declaration>

The thoughtfulness of my teachers, of my parents, of everyone around me was like silent suffocation. I’d heard once about something they used to call bullying.

I wasn’t really sure what it was like, nor had I learned much about it then, at the young age of fifteen, but somewhere I had picked up the vague impression that it involved kids acting in a group to attack a designated target, usually another kid. This had happened all the time at one point, but after the Maelstrom, no attack on so valuable a natural resource as children would have been permitted, not even if the assailants themselves were children. Bullying had simply vanished.

Resource awareness.

That was how people defined their obligation to society. That and the concept of a communal body. Always be aware that you are an irreplaceable resource, they would tell us. “Life is the most important thing of all” and “The weight of a life is the weight of the world” went the slogans.

Had I been born a century earlier, would I have been bullied?

Probably, I thought. I wanted to be bullied. And I knew for sure that I wouldn’t be the one doing the bullying.

≡

So I found her there on my way home from school, sitting in the park next to that jungle gym with something in her hands. It was only later that I learned what that thing was—dead-tree media, a book. Up until that point, I had been as largely ignorant of the past as every other high school student. I knew that parts of our history had been censored, images in particular, though I assumed they were of horribly disfigured corpses, or something like that. You needed special clearance to see those. The bulk of the visual media called movies couldn’t be found on the Borgesnet because of the violence they depicted. Even what had probably been considered tame content by the standards of yesteryear was teeming with violence by the peaceful, elegant standards of admedistrative society. In order to see anything containing a visual portrayal of violence you needed legal credentials: an EVIL, or Emotionally-traumatic Visual Information License.

A license I have now because my work requires it, incidentally, but of course I didn’t have one as a child. I didn’t even know about them. Nor did I know about books, dead and gone a long time by then, nor had I heard that there was a pretty lucrative trade in them among enthusiasts. Girls in high school were so busy growing, where would one have even come by the motivation to learn about the past? Their heads? Their hearts? Their guts?

I wasn’t annoyed by Miach’s presence in the park that day. I merely acknowledged it, passing my gaze over her and moving on.

But Miach saw me.

Thrusting her book into her bag, she strode in my direction, taking big steps. I remember being surprised by her masklike expression. She had one finger thrust out, pointing at the jungle gym.

“You know why they synced the way the jungle gym moves to the children?”

I had no idea. Miach raised an eyebrow at my silence and went on. “It’s so the kids won’t die. Kids used to die on jungle gyms a long time ago. You know that?”

I shook my head. I was dumb. Both in the sense of being speechless and in the sense of being an idiot. I’d never heard of a kid dying by accident or even getting hurt on the jungle gym before. Miach talked like she was playing a flute, an entrancing tone that was as soft as it was cold and utterly devoid of emotion.

“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, jungle gyms were made out of metal—geometric lattices made of crisscrossing pipes.”

“Kids would fall off the top?”

“They sure would. Jungle gyms back then didn’t catch them like the ones do now. Metal bars aren’t intelligent. They can’t change, and they aren’t even soft. Some kids hit their heads on the bars and died of skull fractures. And the sandboxes were breeding pools for viruses and bacteria. The park was a very dangerous place.”

I hadn’t the faintest idea why this person, arguably the strangest girl in class, was giving me an archaeological lecture on the history of jungle gyms. At least by then I had regained enough presence of mind to play along.

“So,” I ventured, “what we call parks nowadays are very different from what they used to be.”

She shook her head. “Not really. The look of the park hasn’t changed for a century. There are trees and things to play on. There were kids back then who sat on benches reading books like I was just now. What’s different is that the sand in the sandbox and the jungle gym and the climbing ropes weren’t intelligent. They didn’t care what happened to the kids that played on them.”

“Sorry, that thing you were looking at just now, that’s a book?” I asked.

“That’s right, Tuan Kirie. I was reading a book. I always carry one around with me. I usually read it during breaks in class.”

Miach pulled her book out of her bag and showed it to me. The cover read An Unremarkable Man.

“Doesn’t sound that interesting.”

Miach laughed at that. “As I thought! I know I have a tendency to fade into the woodwork, but still, I’m amazed you haven’t noticed me before—that girl always off on her own, always reading some strange thing. You don’t pay much attention to your surroundings, do you?”

How hadn’t I noticed her? Practically the only girl who didn’t join in any of the class groups, reading some strange artifact during recess? I thought for a moment that maybe no one had noticed her but immediately dismissed that. With all the initial interest in making friends with Miach, the other kids must have seen her, wondered about her. I was the only one oblivious.

“It’s because you don’t want to pay attention to people. You don’t want to try to be friends. That’s who you want to be, isn’t it? You run with the other girls in their little groups, and you go out to volunteer on the weekends, but the person you’re most concerned with is yourself. You don’t give a rat’s ass about harmony. That’s why you didn’t even bother to notice me and my book.”

She was right.

She was right, and I was sure no one else but she had ever noticed this about me. It took me a while to regain my footing as I considered how to respond. All I managed was a completely tangential, and ultimately stupid, observation.

“Aren’t books kind of heavy and hard to carry around?”

“Yes, they are heavy and hard to carry around, Miss Kirie. Being heavy and hard to carry around is downright antisocial behavior these days, don’t you think?” she said in a voice like a boy soprano’s. And then she began to walk, holding her bag in her hands behind her back. I’m not sure to this day why I followed her. I only remember that it seemed as if what she said, her every word, was cutting into the heart of something I’d been unable to express for so long, and hearing her say it felt good. Or maybe it was that she had found an old blade inside me, rusty from seawater, and given it a bit of a sharpening. Incidentally, when I asked Cian about how she met Miach sometime later, she said she’d met her in the park too.

“So,” Miach said, without turning around. “Q: if a person goes their whole life without falling from anything, how will they know what it means to fall?” I could only see the back of her head, but I was sure she was smiling.

“You’re talking about the jungle gym.”

“Not only that, but good enough.”

“Isn’t it instinct to be afraid of falling?”

It seemed to me pretty unlikely that someone could really go their entire lives without ever falling once, but even if someone managed it, I felt that somehow they would still have a fear of falling in their head.

Miach sighed, a sort of noncommittal sigh neither affirming nor denying my theory.

“So that’s your answer? It’s human nature to be afraid of falling—we’re just made that way?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever fallen off something?”

In fact, I had. It was when I was still pretty young. We’d gone camping, and I slipped off a boulder and fell into a stream. I could remember the instant it happened. You hear people talk about how time slows down during an accident, but for me it seemed like as soon as I realized my feet were slipping I was on my knees in the water.

I had scraped my leg on my way down, and when I looked at it, I saw a thin line of color emerging from my right calf, curling off into the slightly cloudy water like a red ribbon. A little trout had gone swimming through it, and I thought he might get tangled in the thread, but of course he didn’t. A moment later my father was helping me out of the stream. He used his portable med kit to fix my scrape, but I still remember what it looked like, that red thread of blood, drifting almost sensually in the water. The medicule paste—the same stuff that Miach claimed could kill fifty thousand people—quickly sealed the cut while the same medcare tank made antibodies to kill any infectious bacteria I might have picked up. My father attached the unit to the medcare port beneath my shoulder blade.

“What did it feel like, the moment you fell?”

Miach stopped and turned toward me. I answered honestly that it had been over so quick I didn’t remember feeling anything. One moment I was on the boulder, the next I was in the water.

“Oh.”

Miach shrugged and began walking again. I followed along behind.

“So you think someone who’s never taken a fall in their life wouldn’t be afraid of falling?”

“I didn’t say that. But they could forget their fear. Just like we’re forgetting what disease means.”

“Disease is when you get older more quickly and your muscles stiffen up.”

Miach looked over her shoulder, a smile on her lips. “That’s what it means now, true, but that refers to only one condition that affects a few unlucky people with some unlucky genes. I didn’t mean that kind of disease. I mean just getting sick. Like catching a cold or having a headache. Ever heard of those?”

I shook my head.

“In the past, there were lots of diseases in us, thousands. Everyone got sick, and this is only half a century ago I’m talking about. When the nuclear warheads fell during the Maelstrom, everyone got cancer from the radiation. The whole world was one big disease.”

“Oh, I learned about that.”

<reference:textbook:id=hsj56093-4n7mn 2jp:line=3496>

Many people developed cancer from the radiation. At the same time, the radiation caused mutations in China and the depths of Africa, spawning a flood of unknown viruses. With such a clear and present threat to its health, the world transformed overnight from a capitalist society monitored by governmental units to a medical welfare society organized by admedistrative bodies.

</content>

</reference>

“Right? I’m not sure why I have that memorized. Impressed?”

“Yes, but they never tell you about how people used to get sick before then. You may have your history lesson memorized, but you don’t even know what a cold is. How could you? You’ve never experienced one. Our society’s accomplished a pretty amazing thing. Thanks to WatchMe and medcare, we’ve driven almost every disease off the face of the planet.”

I hadn’t told anyone at school who my father was—if they knew anything, it was that he was someone important. Nuada Kirie had been the first scientist to put forth the theory that led to the technologies in WatchMe in a thesis he wrote with an associate thirty-five years ago now.

<reference:thesis:id=stid749-60d-r2yrui6ronl>

<title>

“Concerning the Possibility of Homeostatic Health Monitoring with Medical Particle (Medicule) Swarms and Plasticized Pharmalogical Particles (Medibase).”

</title>

<author>Nuada Kirie, researcher</author>

<author>Keita Saeki, coresearcher</author>

</reference>

Did Miach know? What kind of face would she make if I told her? Would she hate me if I told her that this world she hated so much had all started with my dad? I wondered if I’d get a pardon if I told her that I too hated the world.

“You know we’re living in the future,” Miach said, her grim frown at odds with what should have been a positive statement. “And the future is, in a word, boring. ‘The future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.’ A man named Ballard said that. He was a science fiction writer. And he was talking about here, this place, our world. Our world where the admedistration takes care of everyone’s lives and health. We’re trapped in someone’s antique vision of the future, and it sucks.”

We walked on awhile until we came to a crossroads where Miach stopped and took me by the hand. I froze. This was different. She lifted my hand up before her face, with all the obeisance of a courtier before the queen, and said, “We’ve taken the mechanics of nature—things we didn’t even understand before—and outsourced them. Getting sick, living, who knows what’s next? Maybe even thinking. These things used to belong just to us, they could only belong to us, and now they’re part of the market system, handled externally. I don’t want to be a part of the world. My body is my own. I want to live my own life.Not sitting around like some sheep waiting to be strangled by some stranger’s kindness.”

And then she kissed the back of my hand.

I tried to yank my hand away, but I was already too late. The feel of her lips was permanently inscribed on my skin.

Cold.

That was my first thought. Her lips were cold. But it didn’t feel bad; in fact it left a pleasant chill on my skin, like an aftertaste, that seeped down in between the cells. When I looked up, Miach was already across the street, heading in the direction away from my house.

“You and I are cut from the same cloth, Tuan Kirie,” she called out, smiling again. Then Miach broke into a run and kept running until I could see her no longer.

≡

That was how I met Miach Mihie.

I walked by a park. She was reading a book. That was all.

It was enough to start a friendship that, short-lived though it was, would change the rest of my life.

Before I talk about my separation from and reunion with Miach Mihie, a story which begins in the Sahara, I should start by telling you about Cian Reikado’s death by her own hand. It had been thirteen years since the three of us met. Forty-eight hours before Cian did a face-plant in a plate of insalata di caprese with

<list:item>

<i:bright red slices of tomato>

<i:pure white discs of mozzarella cheese>

</list>

and died, I was in the Sahara, in a world of painted blue and vivid yellow divided along a single line.

<landscape>

<i: Blue sky as far as the eye can see.>

<i: Yellow flowers as far as the eye can see.>

</landscape>

The colors met at the horizon, lush, permeated with pigment, enough to make anyone forget that the Sahara used to be a desert.

Forgotten by man, forgotten from history.

The shimmering waves of heat, the layered petals, even the gentle swaying of stalks in the breeze were all traces left by the painter’s brush—a landscape turned into century-old art. A Mark Rothko abstract in yellow and blue. I sat looking out at it through half-lidded eyes from my vantage point atop a WHO armored transport. My lips relished the texture of the cigar they held, membranes of skin caressing the slight roughness of hard banana leaves. I enjoyed my illicit vice. Our caravan sat at the end of a vast sea of sunflowers, here in the place they once called the Sahara desert. Here, where the RRWs once fell.

<dictionary>

<definition>

The Reliable Replacement Warhead, a type of warhead produced en masse by a nation called the United States of America, starting on or around the year 2010. These warheads were hailed as the “nuclear warhead of the twenty-first century,” intended to replace the aging twentieth century arsenal with better durability, safety, and ease of use. During the Maelstrom which broke out in the English-speaking countries of North America in 2019, many of these warheads found their way to the Third World. And though EU forces, primarily those of France and Germany, intervened and were successful in disabling many nuclear sites, a final toll of thirty-five RRWs were lost from the American arsenal. Of these, fourteen were later recovered, two were detonated on American soil, and the remaining nineteen were used in various conflicts around the world. (Excerpt from an International Atomic Energy Agency report.)

</definition>

</dictionary>

Thus the sunflowers.

It was an old method, yet still very effective. Whenever a war faded into peace, people planted flowers. The only thing different this time had been the scale of the effort. Enough yellow flowers to send a hippie crying for a flashback. It was old-fashioned phytoremediation. Genetically modified sunflowers sent roots deep into the soil, sucking up strontium and uranium and other pollutants along with the nutrients they needed to grow. In the course of a flower’s life cycle, the land was cleansed.

As with so many other nations, the assembled countries of North Africa that so gleefully purchased nukes from unscrupulous characters in America during the Maelstrom and then dropped them with wild abandon here in their own land were now no more than a chapter in the history books. A brief scene in history’s play from an age in which every war of independence bore the label “terrorism.”

“They’re here, ma reine.”

Étienne called up to me from where he leaned against the side of the transport. He was wearing the standard pink medical troop–issue fatigues. Our guests would be coming, bearing gas lighters and cigars. I spotted a cluster of heads wrapped in blue peeking out from the admedistrative society–planted sea of sunflowers. They stuck out against the brilliant yellow of everything around them. The Kel Tamasheq had always worn those indigo turbans and veils, and they probably always would. They even wore them when they rode to war on camelback, which was impressive considering what terrible camouflage indigo made in a field of flowers.

Four Tamasheq warriors emerged from the lapping edge of the sunflower sea, each with the traditional AK-47 on his shoulder. I got down from the roof of the transport and walked up to their leader.

“Greetings, woman of the medicine people. It has been some time.”

“Greetings, warrior of the Tuareg.”

The man in indigo shook his head. “Do you know what this word Tuareg means in Arabic?”

“Sorry.”

“It means ‘the people abandoned by Allah.’ It is the name given to us by outsiders.”

“So what does Kel Tamasheq mean then?”

“The ones who speak Tamasheq.”

I couldn’t help but think that “the people abandoned by Allah” sounded a hell of a lot cooler, and I told him so. Our gods, Asklepios and Hippocrates, watched closely over us, the “medicine people,” and in their name we built temples to clinical medicine and struck down nearly every disease ever known to man. Our faith was such that we would continue striking them down, and so the medicine people would never be abandoned by their gods. We had even put WatchMe inside our bodies, just to make sure there was no place where the eyes of our gods could not see.

“You seem to dislike your own gods, woman of the medicine people.”

“Yet you have no compunction about receiving their bounty from us.” I had meant it as sarcasm, but the Tuareg smiled, white teeth against tan skin. “Yes, but the difference between us is that we worship only the minimum amount, no more. Luckily for us, the gods are very understanding about this arrangement.”

I shook my head and sighed at the pragmatic wisdom of these desert—well, ex-desert—dwellers, and pulled a memorycel from my pocket.

“You think we bow too deeply to our gods, then?”

“In a word, yes. ‘All things in moderation’ you say, but you do not practice it. You are so filled with your faith that you must push it upon us as well. And this is why we fight.”

“You don’t think we represent the Nigerians, do you? We’re not even an old-style government. We are an organization under the Geneva Convention, a consensus of medical conclaves— admedistrations—from all over the world. We’re not allies of Niger, or the Tuareg for that matter. We’re just an armistice monitoring group and not even a sanctioned branch of that.”

“Whether you are Nigerian or of the medicine people it is all the same to the Kel Tamasheq. The only thing different is the surface—your skin. And sometimes not even that.”

“Yes, but admedistrations are governmental systems. It’s politics, not faith.”

“Faith, imperialism—these are two words for the same thing. Niger may invoke this lifeism when they tell us to connect to their server, but it is just imperialism, plain and simple. In the past, we fought against the colonialism of England and France. When Qaddafi saw our bravery, he promised us glory as warriors, but the moment things went south, as they say, we were driven from his lands. We have fought dictators in Mali, Niger, and Algeria. All of them use the same imperialist hardware. Your lifeism is just new software for the same old machinery.”

I sighed again. As a Helix agent operating as part of WHO, political negotiations were a large part of my work, and yet I found politics boring in the extreme. I shook the memorycel in my right hand.

“Then this med patch is imperialist software too.”

“Which is why we partake only in moderation.”

The warrior snapped his fingers, and the men behind him went back into the sunflowers. When they emerged, they were carrying several wooden crates between them. I knew what the crates contained—precious goods still enjoyed widely outside of admedistrative society and strictly forbidden within it. Things like the cigar I was still smoking, and booze, and a whole variety of other unhealthy delights.

“Actually, I’m a fan of moderation myself. That goes for Étienne over there as well, and for a great deal of people back at camp eagerly awaiting our return.”

“Yours is a curious race. If so many of you desire to live in moderation, then why do you accept such rigid restrictions on your own person?”

“No, no, we moderates are in the minority. People like rigid rules and prohibitions, you know. They make them for themselves and live in fear that if they don’t uphold the restrictions then things will go back to the way they were—the dark ages, chaos. That’s basically it. For people living in fear, moderation just doesn’t cut it. And most of the people in my world are fearful. It’s like keeping a piggy bank when you never empty your wallet in the first place.”

“What is this ‘piggy bank’? A wallet, I’ve heard of.”

“Actually, I’m not sure myself. About either of them. They’re both from back when money was something you could put in your pocket.”

Ancient words. The only reason I knew them was because Miach Mihie knew them.

“If your people could only learn the value of moderation, then there would be no war here.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

While the warrior and I spoke, Étienne and his crew received the crates from the Tuareg and began examining their contents. Étienne was French. While he was a bit too macho for my tastes, he had a discerning eye for beauty in his blood, and in my experience there were no people better at finding fault with things than the French. Nestled among the wood chips inside the crates was enough contraband to send any law-abiding member of admedistrative society into a swoon. Not that there would be any lack of those willing to partake back at camp. The moment these crates hit the ground, their contents would be divvied up. That was how it always was. Of course, we only opened the crates to the mob after Étienne’s crew, our coconspirator who downloaded the contents of the memorycel in my hand from the admedistration server, and I took our cuts.

This was how I, as an adult, chose to give the finger to society.

The society that strangled you with kindness.

The society that knocked you out with a stealthy sucker punch to the soul.

All you needed to break free was:

<list:item>

<i: Pretend to accept adulthood.>

<i: Trick the system into believing you were an adult.>

</list>

Just those two things.

They say that long ago, students who wanted to behave badly had to sneak off to the lavatory or go behind the school gym in order to smoke cigarettes. Another thing I learned from Miach. What Miach didn’t know was that the lavatory didn’t cut it if you wanted to smoke a fag these days. Now you had to go all the way to the battlefield. Whether you wanted to see it as the act of a lost soul or as the act of an idiot risking their life for a little nicotine buzz, that was up to you.

I will state for the record, however, that before I got to this place I tried a lot of different things, and I lost something very important to me.

What I tried was overeating and self-starvation.

What I lost was Miach Mihie.

≡

Life.

The swarms of medicules my father and his friend unleashed on the world drove the vast majority of diseases off the face of the planet. The homeostatic internal monitoring system known as WatchMe monitored immune consistency and blood cells down to the level of RNA transcription errors. What didn’t fit was immediately removed. The little pharmaceutical factory found in every household, the medcare unit, instantly formulated the necessary cocktail of medicules for eliminating any disease-causing substances found in blood proteins. In a matter of milliseconds, the unit could pinpoint the area where it was needed most and send in the troops.

“Hey, Tuan, want to die with me?” Miach asked in her usual grand style. I looked around the room. Several of our classmates were still there, well within earshot. Miach was leaning over her chair, elbows on my desk.

Yes, it was a shocking thing for a high school girl to say, but to tell the truth, I wasn’t surprised. I’d had the feeling it was something she was going to ask me someday. It didn’t even surprise me that she chose such a public forum in which to ask. Nor would it surprise me if she had asked us to go right then. It had been clear for some time that suicide was our only way out of this place. We all agreed. Cian was standing right next to Miach, looking serious, waiting for my answer.

Now, I should explain that dying was no simple matter in those days. With the population so dramatically reduced, our bodies were considered public property, valuable resources to society, and as such they were something to be protected, or so went the publicly correct thinking.

In one of her many lectures, which she always delivered with that same nonchalant air, Miach had told us about how, a long time ago, the Catholics had been experts on the taboo against suicide. “You see, your life comes from God. You’re given it by God, whether you want it or not. That’s why mere humans weren’t allowed to throw that life away, like a shepherd doesn’t want his sheep offing themselves. People who committed suicide were reviled. They would bury them in the middle of an intersection so that they would never know the way up to heaven, not until Judgment Day. That was their punishment for betraying God’s trust.”

“I have a hard time imagining us being buried in an intersection,” Cian said with an innocent smile.

Every time Cian smiled it made me inwardly groan a little. Miach ignored her and went on.

“And the successor to that Catholic dogma? Believe it or not, it’s us, with our all-benevolent health-obsessed society. Bodies once received from God are, under the rules of a lifeist admedistrative society, public property. God doesn’t own us anymore, everyone does. Never before in history has ‘the importance of life’ been such a loaded term.”

Miach was right, of course.

And that was why we had to die.

Because our lives were being made too important.

Because everyone was too concerned about everyone else.

Of course, it wasn’t enough to simply die. We had to die in a way that made a mockery of the health regime we were supposed to uphold by law. At least, that was what we thought back then.

“A long time ago, there were kings. When people wanted to change something, they killed the king. Usually, the killing was done by everyone, but not everyone could govern because the flow of information wasn’t so good in those days. That’s why they made governments. Then, if you got angry enough, you could kill your government instead.”

The tone of Miach’s voice seemed to ring clearer as she told us this, more finely honed than usual. It had a beauty to it, enough to send shivers down my spine. It was like a blade—a blade of ice.

“But what do we do now? In a post-governmental admedistrative society, there is no one to kill. Everyone is happy, everyone governs—the basic units of governance are way too small to target.”

Miach looked out the window toward the front gates where our classmates were now stepping out into the street, on their way back home. From the third floor of the school building, you could look down on everything.

“Admedistration. The medical conclaves. A gathering of people who have reached a consensus on a particular medical system. The Harmonics. While an admedistration might have councilors, they’re nothing like members of parliament used to be in the old governments. The councilors and commissioners just don’t have the concentrated power of the old kings. We’ve divided power over such a wide area that we are effectively powerless. Even if we wanted to fight the admedistration like the students of old, there’s no good government building for us to throw our Molotov cocktails at.”

Cian frowned at that, a sudden unease coming over her. “So that’s why we have to commit suicide? That’s our attack on the system?”

Miach nodded firmly. “Exactly. Because we are important to them. Our future potential is their industrial capital. We’re the infrastructure. That’s why we’ll take our bodies, their wealth, away from them. That’s how we’ll tell them our bodies are our own. We’re no different from those who came before us; we’re still trying to fuck the system. It just happens to be the case that the best way to hurt them is to hurt ourselves.”

That was how Miach answered Cian’s worries.

Of course, I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t admit right here that most of the time how Cian and I felt was entirely subordinate to Miach’s charismatic personality. We basked in her glow, hoarding it for ourselves.

Knowing so much, and hating so much, she was an ideologue. You always knew where she stood, which made her very easy to follow.

I don’t imagine, even now, that I made my choice back then out of free will. I just had faith in Miach, who was always so clever, so well prepared. I knew she’d have the perfect way to strike back at the system. So when she brought her hand out in a clenched fist from her pocket and opened her fingers slowly, we knew with a cold clarity that it held our doom.

“See this pill? You only need to take one a day and it’ll completely shut down your digestive tract from your stomach all the way to your large intestine. One of these and your body will completely refuse any and all nutrition.”

“Where did you get it?”

I had no misgivings whatsoever about taking the pill. I asked out of sheer curiosity as to the route by which she had obtained it. For a moment I imagined that she had, against all odds, managed to find one of those morally depraved adults—that anachronistic, extinct breed—living somewhere, and he had rented her body, and as luck would have it, he was a shady pharma dealer.

“I made it. With a medcare unit,” Miach said, dashing my hopes. I knew she wasn’t lying, either. Why would she? Cian came up behind her, putting her hands on Miach’s shoulders, literally backing her up.

“Of course she did,” Cian said. “Miach knows how to use medcare to make poison strong enough to kill an entire city. Making some pills was easy compared to that.”

Without looking around, Miach reached up and gently laid one of her fingers on Cian’s left hand.

In a lot of ways Cian was Miach’s shadow. Like me, she felt uncomfortable in our world, like she didn’t belong, but at the same time Cian was basically a coward who would do anything you said if you said it loud enough. She lived her life in fear.

Miach cleared her throat. “Well, I don’t know about you two, but I’m dying.” She looked at each of us in turn. “Cian? Tuan? What’ll it be?”

I stared at the white pill in Miach’s outstretched hand.

This little white jewel would cut my body off from every bit of nutrition it needed. I could eat my breakfast, lunch, and dinner with everyone watching, while that tiny forbidden fruit led me unerringly down the path of starvation. If we had been adults, the WatchMe inside us would send an emergency malnutrition alert to a health consultant’s server, where it would yell and shout until the admedistration sent a fleet of ambulances to save us from ourselves.

So we had to do it before we became adults. In other words, right now.

Now was our chance. Now that we had met this genius, our savior, Miach Mihie.

If I passed up this opportunity, it would never come again, not for my whole life.

“I’ll do it.”

I don’t know how long I stood there looking at the pill before I answered. Cian looked a little reluctant herself, but she nodded too. The classroom was already empty except for us three. Taking the pills in our hands, we tossed them in our mouths and swallowed.

Of course, I didn’t die.

Thirteen years later, I was standing in the Sahara, blowing thick smoke from between pursed lips, waiting for Étienne and his gang to finish loading the crates into the rear compartment of our armored transport. The Tuareg—Kel Tamasheq—warrior was smoking one of the same cigars as the kind they had brought us. He was watching his men as they squatted on the ground a short distance away, opening a portable parabolic antenna.

“I’ve been meaning to ask for a while now, but what’s with the dish?”

I had seen them bring it every time they came to trade with us. It was an antique communication device, the kind that you needed to use mechanical headphones with to hear. An unusual sight for a member of modern society, who was used to listening to her playlist of tunes on an embedded jawbone receiver.

“Huh? That? It is for sending ultra shortwave transmissions.”

“Who listens to shortwave radio these days?”

“No one. Which is why we use it to communicate with our ally on the International Space Station.”

That was a surprise. I had assumed that the ISS—a relic of the now-defunct United States of America—had been scrapped when its founding nation broke apart in the Maelstrom.

“Really? I had no idea anyone was still up there.”

“Several of your admedistrations joined together to purchase it for the purpose of cultivating astronauts, you see. They’re using it as part of a program to train particularly gifted students. One of our youths managed to beat out ten thousand other applicants—” the Tamasheq warrior slipped back his sleeve, an actor striking a pose, revealing a vintage wristwatch on his arm— “and he is passing over our heads at this very moment.”

“I’m surprised they even let him in with his background, coming from a warring state and all.”

“He grew up in Mali. He is a citizen of the Republic of Mali.

We have many allies who are citizens of many countries. It is one of our strengths as a nomadic people.”

“But what does he tell you from space? ‘I have seen the Earth, and she is blue, like our turbans’?”

The moment I said it, the young man squatting by the dish with the bulky-looking headphones held up his hand. His face had gone pale.

The warrior glared at him. “Calm yourself. What have you heard?”

“We are getting a transmission…a bogey, a surveillance WarBird he thinks, flying toward our position. Probably Nigerian. But the silhouette is strange for a surveillance bird. He says they might be armed.”

Étienne and his gang tensed. If their armistice monitoring group was caught on video trading with the Kel Tamasheq—even if they were only trading immunization patches for tobacco and alcohol—it would look very bad.

I sighed. “Now I see why you always went to such lengths to specify the place and time of our little meetings.”

They were setting the times to coincide precisely with the orbit of that museum of a space station carrying their young spy inside. While we were monitoring the Tuareg, they were watching us too.

“Yes, without the support of our friend above, we would not be able to make these trades. This is a battlefield, you know. He is our spy satellite.”

The Kel Tamasheq warrior thrust out his hand, and I placed the memorycel in it. People with WatchMe installed could use their own skin as a storage medium, transferring data merely by touching fingers for a few seconds, but the Tamasheq had demanded we bring the data inside this little rectangular crystal. Only then would they make the trade. They still only trusted things you could see with your eyes here. It was a kind of animism. Something physical had to be exchanged for there to be barter, and that was it. Even when the medium was essentially for show.

“This should work against the new infection that’s been spreading in the area. Just install it on your server and your WatchMe will block off the access routes that the disease’s prions are using.”

I should pause at this point to mention, somewhat belatedly, that the Kel Tamasheq people all had WatchMe installed too. Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression or conjured some romantic image of a primitive, pure people, unsullied by medical nanotech. The Tamasheq weren’t Mennonites or Amish. If something was good, they took it—in moderation. They were wise that way. If all it took was a brief injection, then sure, they’d install WatchMe in themselves.

So,

<question>

<Q: Say you’re the Tuareg, and you’ve all injected yourselves with WatchMe and created an internal health monitoring network. So you’ve been monitoring your peoples’ health for a while, and you find this disease. What do you, as the Tuareg, do now?>

<A: You can’t do anything. No war-torn minority tribe has the money in their coffers to pay for an immunization program, even if they already have the distribution network in place. And the Kel Tamasheq medical server isn’t attached to the admedistration network either. It’s purely a local area network—an ethnic-area network, even.>

</question>

We had protected their server for them on several occasions. And now, we helped them by copying immunization program patches from our base server and trading them to them in secret.

In other words, our little illicit trade was saving lives.

All with programs filched from the admedistration.

<list:item>.

<i: We save lives.>

<i: We get smokes.>

</list>

“The deal is made.”

“And we’re out of time.” I gathered my long hair into a ponytail. “We’ll be heading back to our ‘temple’ now, before Niger finds us here.”

The Kel Tamasheq gave a hearty laugh. “If you hate your gods so, why not come live with us, woman of the medicine people? We treat our women with much respect. Especially now when there is war, women are very precious to us.”

“Thanks for the proposal, but I’ll pass.”

“For what reason?”

“For the very reason that I’m here in the first place—because I’m a coward.”

For three or four seconds, the Kel Tamasheq warrior looked at me in silence. To show that he understood and was sorry on my behalf.

I could talk the talk, but I was thoroughly unable to leave my admedistration, to escape the society into which I’d been born. No matter how much I wanted to leave. And why was this? In a word, fear. No matter how much I hated it, I couldn’t bear to see it all go away.

It was this fear that:

<list:item>

<i: Left Miach to die alone.>

<i: Left Cian and me to remain.>

</list>

I think I just wasn’t strong enough to follow Miach to the other side.

I wasn’t brave enough.

That was all the Kel Tamasheq warrior needed to hear in order to understand. His wrinkled, dark face, burnt darker by ultraviolet radiation, broke into a broad smile—a father’s smile. He stuck out his hand for a shake.

“Then we will meet at our next exchange, woman of the medicine people. If you should change your mind and wish to join us, you are always welcome.”

“At the next exchange, then, warrior of the people who speak Tamasheq.”

It was enough for me to know I had a place where I could escape.

The kindness the Tamasheq warrior had shown me was of a completely different variety from the forced charity I had grown up with. It was the sort of kindness that grew only in the harshest environments, among a people who had fought hard for their freedom against a long line of imperialists and dictators.

Both I and the warrior turned away then and walked back toward our own people.

“A little faster, ma reine!” Étienne called from the passenger seat window of the transport. I waved at him to quiet him down and went around to the other side, hopped in the driver’s seat, and gripped the wheel.

<declaration>

<i: My job is to start wars.>

<i: At least everyone seems to think so.>

</declaration>

It wasn’t always like this. Things had been different, albeit some time before I entered the agency.

The Helix Inspection Agency was part of WHO, the World Health Organization.

In the beginning we were like the International Atomic Energy Agency, but for genetics rather than nukes. It was our job to visit any admedistration facility doing research on genetic engineering to make sure nothing was being produced that could potentially be a threat to humankind. We were supposed to monitor the technology, that was all. That was around when the “helix” got attached to our name.

However it happened, the scope of our operations expanded wildly over the years until we were basically a flag-waving troop of diplomats-cum-peacekeepers charged with the protection of life everywhere—not to put too fine a point on it. As Miach used to say, no one who waves a big flag is up to any good. So we would wander into other admedistrations and even some old-style governments to check whether they were ensuring their populace a lifestyle that was sufficiently “healthy and human”—a recipe for conflict if there ever was one. We were like a hand grenade loaded with the seeds of mass mayhem, one our elders had gleefully passed on to us for reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom.

This was the place I had chosen to be my escape from the world.

As nations gradually downsized their functions, leaving only a smattering of military and police forces, stewardship of the planet’s economy fell to the massive number of admedistrations that rose in their place. Unlike the now-obsolete national governments, admedistrations were smaller units, operating on shared principles of medicine, thoughtfulness, and charity—which meant if they saw a neighbor suffering, they couldn’t just stand back and leave them to their own devices. Even though Niger was ostensibly still an old-style nation, the reason for their altercation with the Tuareg was none other than a misguided attempt to force the Kel Tamasheq to link to the Nigerian medical server—“To ensure the nomads a more healthy lifestyle,” they said.

The Kel Tamasheq’s response, of course, was “Fuck off.”

The sociologists expressed the guiding principle behind the Helix Inspection Agency and ostensibly, the Nigerian government, like this:

<dictionary>

<item>Lifeism</item>

<definition>

A politically enacted policy or tendency to view the preservation of health to be an admedistration’s highest responsibility. Based on the welfare societies of the twenty-first century. In practical terms, this means the inclusion of every adult in a homeostatic health-monitoring network, the establishment of a high-volume medical consumer system with affordable medicine and medical procedures, and the provision of proper nutrition and lifestyle advice designed to mitigate predicted lifestyle-related illnesses. These activities are seen as the basic minimum conditions for human dignity.

</definition>
</dictionary>

We Helix agents were the elite soldiers of lifeism. That was how many people saw us, at any rate. And it was true enough that, when we did mobilize after receiving requests from several admedistrations, what I would write in my subsequent reports would oftentimes lead the parties involved directly to war.

With our current Sahara situation, the agency hadn’t even decided which side we were on. As I said before, the Tuareg had installed WatchMe, and they were using that fact to argue that they were not the anti-lifeists the Nigerians said they were.

As the self-appointed judges of all life, the Helix Inspection Agency never wanted for critics with axes to grind—sometimes quite literally.

<list:item>

<i: shooting>

<i: stabbing>

<i: strangling>

<i: poisoning>

<i: bombing>

</list>

These were just some of the varied ways in which no fewer than twelve Helix agents had died in the line of duty. This was the job I had found for myself, traipsing to every war zone in the world, inviting hatred at every turn—a senior inspector at the tender age of twenty-eight. Due to the dangers inherent in the job, I had trained in how to use most modern weapons and more than a few primitive ones as well.

Which was why it made sense for Étienne—whose machismo was undercut by an utter lack of combat experience—to call to me for help from the gunner seat of our armored transport.

<shout>

“We have a problem, ma reine! They’re going to see us!”

</shout>

“Oh, they’ve probably already taken several pictures,” I muttered to myself, then shouted over the whine of the transport’s engine and the creaking of the suspension, “You think it’s a standalone?”

“Probably,” Étienne shouted back. “Niger knows the Tuareg use electronic countermeasures, so there’s a good chance the WarBird flies silent.”

“Someone’s highly trained, hopped-up bald eagle then.”

“The brain, yes. But the body is a soft composite. Plenty of hard points on the wings.”

“A surveillance bird packing heat? That’s a bit odd.”

“This is supposed to be a no man’s land. If anyone’s out here, it would be either the Nigerians themselves or the Tuareg. Why wouldn’t they come armed?”

“Well, as long as they really are on their own and don’t get any images of us back to their HQ, we’re fine.”

I told one of Étienne’s men to drive for me and gave him the wheel. Moving into the back compartment, I pulled out a lethal-looking cylindrical object stashed next to the crates of cigars and booze—something the Kel Tamasheq warrior had thrown in as a “bonus.”

“Get down from the gunner’s seat, Étienne. I’ll handle this.”

“What do you mean handle—”

When the Frenchman looked down from his perch and saw what I was holding, every muscle in his body froze, causing his hands to slip from the railing. Étienne fell past me down into the passenger compartment. Not that I blamed him. It wasn’t every day you saw a girl cradling a more-than-a-century-old RPG launcher under her arm.

“Tell your man driving to keep us going straight. Whatever he does, I don’t want him jerking the wheel one way or the other.”

“Got it,” came the muffled reply. Shamelessly violent launcher in hand, I stuck my torso out through the rooftop hatch.

“You sure you can handle that thing, Miss Kirie?” I heard Étienne’s voice from the floor of the transport below.

“Better than you can,” I replied quietly, then gave the trigger a squeeze.

For all their sophistication, WarBirds were fairly artless things when it came to flying. They never zigzagged or circled, just flew straight toward their target like this one was flying toward us right now. All I had to do was fire my gift from the Kel Tamasheq into the air directly behind us to ensure a fatally explosive midair rendezvous.

<list:item>

<i: wings covered with hard points>

<i: a body and fuselage controlling the wings>

<i: a living animal brain fused with a neural net>

<i: a little bit of armor plating>

</list>

What had been the bird scattered in the sky in a brief flare of plasma—a daub of bright paint haphazardly added to the blue and yellow landscape.

“Combat glasses!” I shouted, thrusting my hand down into the compartment without taking my eyes off the sky behind us. Étienne passed up his binoculars and I quickly scanned the area. No more WarBirds in sight.

“Nothing at a low altitude, at least. Let’s keep an eye out though,” I announced as I ducked back inside the transport.

I let the now-empty launching tube roll on the floor, and I collapsed, feeling the tension drain from my limbs. After I had caught my breath, I undid my ponytail. Free from its restraint, my hair swirled, brushing across my forehead and cheeks.

Smoking cigars was tough these days. Getting your hands on them in the first place was even harder. My mind, newly released from the vice-grip of tension, was whimpering inside my skull, wanting to see nothing, hear nothing. Why not? Étienne can get us back to the base. I’ll just sit here quietly until we’re through that security gate.

I closed my eyes and let a soft sleepiness come over me. Waves of fatigue, lapping at my temples.

≡

The swift realization came the moment I opened my eyes. I failed.

The light on the ceiling glowed with a soft, pale pink light.

I was lying on my side, surrounded by machinery. There were tubes attached to me—not just the one on the medport below my collarbone, but attached the old way too, with needles. I was in an emergency room at a hospital. Or maybe an emergency morality center. It only took me a little while to realize which it probably was.

I was alive. Which meant I had failed.

Not just once, but twice.

This hadn’t been the first time I’d attempted to kill myself with food. A while before I’d even met Miach Mihie, I’d been carried to a center just like this one after overeating. I don’t think I had consciously decided to die that first time. It was more of a vaguely defined longing toward death that had been rattling around inside my skull for years before I finally decided to take action.

<disappointment>

Overeating didn’t kill me. Neither did undereating.

</disappointment>

“Not again,” I mumbled, even though by then I had realized that my mom was sitting right there next to my bed.

This is it, this is the time I die. I had been so sure of it. How foolishly optimistic I had been. All I needed was Miach and the tools—the weapons—she gave me, I’d thought, and I’d make it for sure. If she could make a device capable of mass murder out of a household medcare unit, she could do anything.

If I couldn’t do this thing even with her help, then I’d live my entire life without being able to do it at all.

How completely dependent on her I was.

“You’re awake,” my mother said, then she began to cry. It was like what I’d said hadn’t even fazed her. Or maybe my throat had been too parched for her to make out the words. Who cared, anyway? I was the one that would have to live with my failure, not her.

“What about Miach?”

This time I was sure she heard me. I saw her frown a little, her eyebrows drawing together. I asked her again.

Somewhere over my head, a children’s bio-monitor was softly chirping away.

I wouldn’t need one of those if I were an adult. They wouldn’t need any external devices to tell what was going on inside me. Not with WatchMe installed. Not with a swarm of medicules tattling on everything going on beneath my skin at all times.

“Miach … didn’t make it,” my mother said, chewing her lip. Like it was her fault.

I wanted to vomit.

<anger>

Don’t do that, Mom.

</anger>

My mouth remained closed, but inside my thin, motionless body, I shouted: Don’t do that! Don’t feel guilty about someone else’s death! She had nothing to do with you! It was this world— the one that demanded you sympathize with everyone, even people you’d never met—that I couldn’t stand. The air reeked of kindness, with the awareness that everyone was public property. The only acceptable form of thought was a public correctness that compelled you to blame yourself for not being able to stop someone from committing suicide—even if there was no conceivable way you could have.

But I lacked the stamina and the will to shout it out loud, so I simply muttered, “So she died.”

My mother nodded, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Cian’s okay, though. She’s being treated at a different center.”

“Oh.”

The pharmaceutical regime and counseling that came next dragged me, kicking and screaming, back into society’s fold.

<list:item>

<i: Out of the world of hypokalemia.>

<i: Out of the world of hypothyroidism.>

<i: Out of the world of osteoporosis.>

</list>

Back to the world of constant, mandated health.

With daily counseling and daily pills, I dug the ditch of my failure ever deeper. At least I had the common sense not to let my counselor know how I felt about it.

It came to me as I was riding home from the center in a taxi with my mother.

I was sitting next to her, looking out the window at the evening sun on the Sumida River. The calm serenity of the buildings lining both banks chilled me to the bone. They were all painted in pastels—pink, blue, green—all of them just a little off-white.

There weren’t any laws against painting a building something more exciting, and yet here they were, an endless line of houses, all cast in bland, nondescript shades. None of them stood out against the others. Nothing to disturb the eye, and therefore nothing to disturb the heart.

<hopelessness>

There’s nothing I can do.

</hopelessness>

It was then that I learned how to give up. Miach was dead, and she had accomplished nothing. I lost all hope in the world and, at the same time, learned how to live without hope.

I looked out the window and saw the evening sun on the twelfth of June, 2060, shining down on a giant hospital ward stretching to the horizon on both sides of the river. Mankind was trapped in an endless hospital.

<regret>

I’m sorry, Miach.

</regret>

I couldn’t do it. And it had taken the sacrifice of a life to the gods of medicine for me to understand. I started to cry there in the backseat of a taxi. My mother’s eyes remained fixed forward on the road ahead, as though she didn’t notice. After I cried myself out, I leaned back in my seat and fell asleep.

≡

I opened my eyes again.

Tuan Kirie, senior inspector, age twenty-eight.

Étienne was shaking me by the shoulder where I lay next to the crates of cigars and wine.

“We are at the base, ma reine.”

The “blushing maiden brigade.”

That was what people called the medical corps. I think they meant it as a compliment.

If you were wondering whether every admedistration’s medical corps wore pink uniforms, you were right. Go to France, Russia, or Mexico, and every medical corps uniform, helmet, and armor transport was painted the color of a lightly ripened peach. Like the army always wore drab olive, and the navy black and white.

Which was why the tents in the Niger armistice monitoring camp were all pink.

Against the sea of pale pink, the deep crimson coats we Helix agents wore stood out. We stood out everywhere, for that matter. Now I was making my way through the tents, back to where the crates were being unloaded—our backyard.

I carried off the portion for myself and for our server techie— call him Alpha—and left Étienne and his crew to handle the rest of it. I would get back to my own office as quickly as possible and drink myself into a stupor, as I always did. At least, that was the plan.

I had zero interest in knowing the details of how Étienne divvied up the booty from the Kel Tamasheq, or how much money he made, or how much he skimmed for himself. He would always pass me some credit after we were done, so I knew he at least wasn’t stealing everything. That was good enough for now. All I needed were smokes and booze. That was it.

<list:item>

<i: Things to damage my lungs.>

<i: Things to damage my liver.>

</list>

In my world, you had to come all the way out to this hinterland, to a battlefield, just to find ways to damage yourself. Effective, yet ultimately trivial ways. Far more trivial than what I had attempted back in high school, before I lost Miach.

“I brought the goods,” I announced, stepping past the pink flap of the tent where Alpha worked—where I found not only Alpha surrounded by his infield terminal screens, but also my boss with an excessively stern look on her face. I caught the look of abject fear on Alpha’s face and realized things had taken a decided turn for the worse. “We were waiting for you, Senior Inspector Kirie,” the woman in the crimson coat just like mine announced.

“You needed to talk to me about something, Os Cara?”

“Only about what that is you’re hiding behind your back.”

I shrugged and tossed the vintage wine in her direction. I had a reputation for giving up easily.

She caught the ancient Petrus, the ruby red liquid sloshing inside the glass bottle.

<dictionary>

<item>Château Petrus</item>

<definition>

Brand name of an alcoholic beverage originating in France’s Pomerol region. A “bordeaux wine.” Noted for its label depicting Saint Peter, the twelfth apostle.This château wine vaulted from relative obscurity to immense popularity after winning a gold medal at the 1889 Paris Exposition. One of the most expensive wines in its heyday, after the Maelstrom and the ascendance of lifeism it shared the same fate as all other alcoholic beverages.

</definition>

</dictionary>

It had already been over forty years since anyone in a developed country had been able to freely enjoy alcohol. “What do we have here?” Os Cara breathed as she caught the bottle of forbidden pleasure lightly in her left hand. “I would ask if you have no shame, but then, I already know the answer.”

“It’s called wine.” I snorted. “Heard of it?”

She didn’t even look at the label. “A bordeaux. Lots of merlot in these—100 percent in some barrels, depending on the year. Makes for a very smooth texture.”

“No shit.”

“Most certainly not. I drank one of these when I was much younger, actually. The last generation that could truly relish alcohol. We had a Petrus just like this one in my house.”

“I hear it was quite expensive,” I said, stepping closer to the trembling Alpha and my boss, even as I felt like I was walking into a trap.

“My family was quite well-to-do before the Maelstrom.”

“You don’t say,” I said, now standing directly in front of my boss. Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg.

<notes> Anointed the cherub of Helix agents; at Geneva HQ she’s known simply as ‘Prime.’ Single. Age seventy-two, with the looks of a beautiful woman in her late thirties due to ultrahigh resolution WatchMe, a perfect control system, regular antioxidant treatments, and periodic removal of accumulated RNA transcription errors. </notes>

“Well, this won’t do.” She presented the bottle. “You know how embarrassing something like this is for us.”

“I haven’t lost all capacity for rational thought, if that’s what you’re suggesting, Prime,” I said, my smile thin.

She glared at me. Alpha, sweating bullets, shrank back into the shadow of his monitors. He wasn’t even seeing us there anymore. His eyes were looking off into the distance somewhere, probably at the wreckage of his career.

“At least you seem to be aware of your own wrongdoing. However, you clearly do not comprehend where we are and what we’re doing here.”

I had to laugh at that. It was precisely because I knew so thoroughly what kind of place the Sahara was that I had specifically requested a transfer here. There was silence again until my boss spoke.

“The Nigerian armistice monitoring group is in an extremely delicate situation at present. The report that we Helix agents submit will determine which of the two parties, the Nigerians or the Tuareg, had the right of this conflict.”

I shrugged. I was pretty sure that if it became known we were partaking of smokes and booze, the Tuareg would probably consider us their allies, what with their predilection for living a life of moderation. This was apparently not the scenario my boss had in mind, however. She began to walk around me in a tight circle.

“The monitoring we do on behalf of admedistrative society must not be allowed to itself incite more conflict. If word got out that we, who by all rights should be the upholders of lifeism and champions of long life and health, were indulging in such harmful substances as alcohol and tobacco, it would be a disaster.”

A disaster for whom, I wondered. It certainly wouldn’t bother me any. I wasn’t harming anyone with my secondhand smoke. And shouldn’t I be allowed to harm myself as much as I pleased? No, I immediately corrected myself. Even thinking that was verboten in this age of public correctness.

“What I want to know is how you kept your own WatchMe silent all this time. Any amount of alcohol consumption should trigger the medicules in your system, which would immediately inform the health supervision server—”

“Well, being out here in the sticks and all, the server does go off-line pretty frequently,” I said, as though my boss really needed an explanation of conditions here at the armistice monitoring camp. “And besides, we girls know a little magic. That is, those of us who still remember that we’re girls.”

“That’s very funny,” she said without a trace of humor in her voice. “I don’t know what underhanded means you used to get this contraband, but I will have you know what damage your actions have caused to our operations.”

“I already know: none.”

I clapped a hand on her shoulder as lightly as I could. In her crimson coat, Os Cara Stauffenberg quaked with rage. I ran my finger gently over the embossed snakes curling around the staff of knowledge on the WHO badge she wore. “I wouldn’t worry about your badge getting tarnished, Os Cara. Because you’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you.”

Os Cara clucked her tongue. It occurred to me that this was probably the most dramatic expression of disdain she, a dyed-in-the-wool member of admedistrative society, could muster.

<anger>

“Of course I can’t go public with this.”

</anger>

She glared at me. “If the authority of this agency were to be impugned, then all our efforts to make this world a healthier, more peaceful, more charitable place will have been wasted. Even in the short term, were I to go on the record about your little ‘party time,’ our monitoring operation here in Niger would lose any and all credibility overnight.”

<sarcasm>

“So sorry to hear that, Prime.”

</sarcasm>

At this point, Alpha seemed to realize that things might not be as terribly bad as he’d imagined them to be. I gave him a pat on the shoulder as well, saying, “I certainly hope nothing of the sort happens to our wonderful operation here.”

<yell>

“I’m not finished!”

</yell>

Alpha resumed his former state of rigid terror.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to take responsibility for what you’ve done, Senior Inspector Kirie. You will be returning home on the next available flight and remain until you’ve seen the error of your ways.”

“Home? You don’t mean Japan…”

No fucking way.

After all I’d done to escape that gulag—the overeating, the starvation, the loss of a friend—all ending in the pursuit of my current career flying from one war zone to another.

No fucking way.

“That’s right. Japan. I won’t have you using this battlefield for your recreation room. You betrayed us. I want you to go back and experience what it’s like to truly love and be loved by your neighbor, Tuan. You will learn how to be publicly correct.”

My boss set the bottle of wine down by one of Alpha’s terminals and strode out of the tent, leaving me rooted to the spot. I was already beginning to imagine the days of depression ahead of me. I would be living in Japan. The place I hated as a youth, the place Miach detested with all her heart. Japan.

“You’re incredible,” Alpha whispered, a sigh of relief escaping his lips. “Simply amazing. I can’t believe you got off with such a light punishment. I’d heard you were a powerhouse, Tuan, but that was something else. No wonder Étienne calls you his queen.”

I felt the sudden urge to slap the cheerfully babbling Alpha hard across the cheek, but instead of allowing myself to resort to violence, I picked up the wine and slammed the entire bottle of Château Petrus in one breath. A stream of the ruby liquid spilled from the side of my mouth and ran down my chin, splattering over my crimson Helix agent’s coat. Alpha swallowed, his momentary elation evaporating more quickly than the wine on my collar.

I needed this. I needed to be able to drink like this. It might be my last drink in a long time.

My heart sank.

Sayonara, Sahara.

Catch you around, Kel Tamasheq.

And so I found myself stranded in the desert called normal life. A vast wasteland of public correctness and people as resources.

Stuck in a sinkhole called harmony.

I could see it spreading out from the airport like an oily film on the land. Forming a gestalt that made me want to retch. I spotted clusters of residential buildings below, square little blocks in inoffensive pastels. Like tiny multiplying pixels of artificial life on a monitor. The PassengerBird I was on flexed its wings, tracing a soft circle through the air. An announcement sounded near my inner ear, telling me to prepare for landing.

An RPG comes flying out of nowhere, slamming into the side of the PassengerBird.

The giant bird flies into pieces, raining down its contents—the passengers—on the little Cubist residents far below. In death, the bird looks just like the WarBird I shot down over the Sahara. The men in suits spill out of its body cavity so lightly and evenly, just like in Golconde <notes> Rene Magritte painting, c. 1953 </notes>. On the ground, the residents waste no time flinging off their pretenses of charitable love to pick up baseball bats with which to knock the falling men back up into the air.

As the bird touched down on the runway I realized I had been daydreaming. The other passengers were already standing from their seats, getting ready to disembark. I grabbed my bag, left the bird, went through luggage screening, and spilled out with the rest of the bird droppings into a burgundy-colored airport lobby.

The moment that I stepped off the PassengerBird, the augmentedreality in my contacts kicked in. Just about everything in my field of vision had AR metadata associated with it. I glanced at the entrance to a café and saw the menu hanging in midair with a meter next to it telling me how many seats were empty and next to that some stars indicating favorable reviews.

Everything in our world had a user review attached to it.

Even people had little social assessment stars stuck on them.

Café de Paris in the airport lounge: four stars.

Tuan Kirie: four stars.

Cian Reikado: three.

<shout>

“Tuan! Tuantuantuan!”

</shout>

A little girl’s voice shouting my name.

Since I didn’t know any little girls, I was pretty sure it had to be Cian Reikado. She was one of the only people who knew I was coming back. I went to pick up my Helix agent code at the baggage counter, then turned to Cian, who was yelping and jumping with excitement. If she’d had a tail, she’d have been wagging it for sure. Some public metadata was attached to her body—the name of the admedistration she belonged to and the <notes: social assessment> SA </notes> score she’d been assigned by her admedistration’s moral consortium.

“How’d you find me in that crowd?” I asked.

“What are you talking about, Tuan? You stand out in any crowd!”

“Oh?”

“You should really watch that—you probably attract enough attention as it is with your job and all. Wow, you’re really, uh, rough-looking too. No offense.”

“Comes with the territory. I can’t help it if battlefields always tend to be the deserts and the highlands and the swamps. It’s tough on the skin.”

To tell the truth, my skin condition probably had more to do with my various indulgences than any battlefield conditions. The only thing keeping my WatchMe from alerting the nearest admedistration-contracted counselor was the DummyMe I’d installed to send phony data about my body to the server, but the DummyMe fell short when it came to fooling the human eye. I must’ve stuck out like a sore thumb.

<list:item>

<i: a daily pill from the medcare unit>

<i: an appropriate lifestyle chart from your life designer>

<i: health food designed to leave a minimal footprint on your body>

<i: appropriate health counseling>

<i: a medicule swarm to eliminate the blemishes on my skin before they turn malignant>

</list>

Having bad skin meant you weren’t living up to at least one of the basic requirements of lifeist society. A sure sign you were a wrench in harmony’s cogs. Lifeist society meant everyone, man or woman, had to conform to certain standards. Nonconformity made itself physically obvious.

Bad skin? A sure sign of poor self-control.

Shadows under your eyes? A lack of proper publicly correct resource awareness.

All of this was reflected in your SA score. The vast majority of admedistrations required all adults to make their histories, including their medical records, public knowledge. This was, in part, to make the process of assigning a social assessment score as transparent as possible. No doubt, if politicians these days were as fat as the leaders of old had been, such open sharing of personal information would never have come to pass.

I remembered my surprise when I came across pictures of great leaders while leafing through historical archives.

There they were, unadulterated, men and women of power, and most of them were grossly overweight.

Judged by modern standards, someone like Churchill could never be considered a hero. Who would trust a man as copiously fat as that? Any nude painted before the eighteenth century was completely out as well.

I came across an old schoolyard rhyme once.

Fatty fatty, two-by-four, can’t fit through the bathroom door!

<question>

<Q: What does the word fatty, repeated here, mean?>

<A: It is a pejorative term referring to a person who is overweight.>

</question>

Words like “fatty” hadn’t been used in years—too great a risk of hurting someone’s feelings. Not that there was anyone chubby enough to rate the term anyway. Like alcohol, tobacco, and the morally depraved man who paid money for sex with girls, these terms of belittlement had simply faded away. They were soon followed in their extinction by fat people and even skinny people. All gone. Under the constant monitoring of WatchMe and the constant advice of a health consultant, obesity and emaciation both had been driven out of the human experience.

I looked at Cian, my friend who had tried to starve herself to death along with me and Miach.

Her body fit perfectly within the prescribed margins for a healthy adult.

A boring body, in a boring adult size.

I quickened my pace across the airport lobby—itself designed with incredible attention paid to reducing any feeling of oppressive authority the structure might have naturally possessed. A cluster of yellow tables stood out against the burgundy interior, grabbing the eye. As I headed for the subway, dragging my bags behind me, Cian made an effort to match my pace. It was incredible really. For all the vast space here, and the high ceilings, I couldn’t detect a whiff of authority to the place. Admedistrative design was sterile like that. By their very nature, large architectural spaces had a certain fascist scent to them, a prideful authority that came from being monumental and leaked out whether the builders intended it to be there or not. Large structures made human beings small by comparison. Even public places, like this airport, did that.

Which was why the designers of the place had pulled out all the technological stops to reduce the impact of the airport’s size. I could sense the attempt to cover the unwanted stench of power, and it made me sick to my stomach. Calling the place a monastery made it sound too Christian, but it was true that the world we lived in often felt like it was being run by nuns. It was fascism, courtesy of Mary, Mother of God.

The world had been made thoroughly gentle. Even the arts.

My profiling sheet—just one of a multitude of healthmaintenance applications I had to use in my daily life—was like another version of me.

A version of me that accepted everything the real me hated.

My profiling sheet lived inside the admedistration server from where it monitored my daily routine, identifying my likes and dislikes and keeping a careful eye out for anything, be it literature or an image, that might cause me emotional trauma. Any novel or essay I was about to read would be scanned in advance and cross-referenced with my therapy records. If any content therein touched on a past trauma I had experienced, it would often be filtered out before I ever saw it. At the very least, I would receive a warning. This work of art contains potentially emotionally damaging material, or my favorite, This novel contains possible violations to the general morality code, article 40896-A as determined by the Health and Clarity Admedistration Moral Review Board of 4/12/2049.

When all possibility of fear was removed from our environment, a more subtle kind of fear replaced it.

<recollection>

                 “Do you know something?” I heard Miach say. “A long, really long time ago, there was this artist who used an airplane and smoke to write the word BANG in the sky over Hiroshima. What do you think?”
    “Bang, like the atomic bomb? That’s in pretty bad taste, I’d say.”
    “It’s totally in bad taste!” Miach said, grinning. “The artist got so much criticism that he had to publicly apologize. Because his art made some people unhappy, it hurt people’s feelings. But no one would even do that kind of thing these days. They’d be warned away from it by the admedistration before they even got to it. They probably wouldn’t even have the idea in the first place. With these filters warning us what we’re about to see all the time, no one looks at anything. How could an artist get any bad ideas to start with? I look at old books and paintings and I envy the imaginations of our predecessors. I really do.”
    “Why?”
    “Because there was always the chance that they would hurt with their art. Always the chance they would make someone sad or angry.”

</recollection>

My eyes fell on an old man, a custodial worker, cleaning the airport. Clearly, he hadn’t been paying as much attention to his health as he should have. His SA score was about as low as it got. A low SA score brought job security of a kind—no one would dream of taking your job away from you, out of pity—but it also meant an utter lack of mobility. You were basically stuck doing whatever it was they made you do. That said, the old man was very likely leading a fairly comfortable life, thanks to food distributed by volunteers and a living support center where he could sleep at night. He might’ve even had some family.

Cian was slightly shorter than I was, so when we walked side by side, she had to lengthen her strides just to keep up. When I walked, I didn’t care whether I was matching anyone else’s pace or not. I had decided that was how I was going to walk a long time ago. Right after I’d lost Miach.

And there it was. Walking together with Cian brought on the feeling of loss I had dreaded was out there somewhere waiting for me. Miach should’ve been standing right there, right by Cian, book held behind her back, telling us in great detail (without actually looking at us) how we could damage the world in which we lived.

It was like Cian and I were a temple from which someone had stolen our golden Buddha named Miach Mihie. I couldn’t help feeling like there was this space in front of us that should have been filled.

Odd that being together with someone should remind me of what was missing. Our charismatic leader, gone these thirteen years. She carried far too much knowledge in her tiny body, and far too much hatred, and far too much beauty. And now she was gone.

<recollection>

I want to dance on the graves of those kind, healthy people.
A waltz, I think.

</recollection>

A nonexistent Miach looked back at us over her shoulder.

Miach Mihie. Miach Mihie. Miach Mihie.

We passed by volunteers handing out artificial protein soup to political refugees in the airport lobby and took the elevator down to the floor where the subways connected to the airport. On my way down, I had the sudden sensation that Miach was standing right behind me, and I had to turn and look, but it was only Cian.

“You going home?” she asked me as we waited on the subway platform. The platform had been painted an inoffensive sea blue.

I shook my head. “I’ll look for a hotel or find someplace to crash. There’s nothing for me at home.”

“I wouldn’t say that. Everyone wants to hear your stories, you know.”

“Who’s everyone?” I chuckled and shook my head. “Actually, I did get a message from one of the neighbors saying they wanted to throw a welcome home party. They were going to call everyone for two blocks around and be here waiting when my PassengerBird landed. Can you imagine? No thanks. That’s the last thing I need. Especially since my mom was so enthusiastic about the idea.”

“Why not let them have their party? It could be fun.”

“I have nothing to talk to them about.”

“What are you saying? You could tell them about the Sahara, or where you were before that—Colombia, was it? You’ve been to so many places and seen so many things, Tuan.”

Yeah, I could tell them stories. Like the one about the child soldiers drugged up and made to shoot their own parents and siblings for target practice. Or the bloody severed arms and legs piled up in heaps like firewood. Hardly anyone who bought into the admedistration’s protected life had the faintest clue about the realities of war. They were far too busy being nice to everyone in their immediate vicinity to care. Cian was as ignorant as any of them. Ignorant and innocent. Nothing had changed in that regard.

“And I think they’d want to hear about what you’ve been doing,” Cian was saying.

“I’m just not interested.” I sighed for effect. “Cian, you volunteering at all?”

“A little. Three days a week. Delivering meals and taking care of the elderly, that sort of thing.”

“Morality sessions and health conferences?”

“Online, yeah. About fifteen hours a month. It’s not too bad.”

What was this? One of my friends, a girl who couldn’t stand this world, who tried to kill herself just to leave a mark on its perfect face, had conformed completely to a typical, publicly correct lifestyle.

Or maybe it was less personal. Maybe it was just that kids grew up and became adults.

<definition>

<i: To become an adult is to:>

<d: Install WatchMe.>

<d: Accept the dictates of an admedistration.>

<d: Attach oneself to the admedistration server.>

<d: Receive lifestyle directives from some health consultant.>

<d: Show up for conclave sessions, both online and off-line.>

</definition>

Miach’s ghost hovered nearby, a cold smile on her lips as she whispered.

This body, these tits, this ass, this uterus. These are mine.

Aren’t they?

So after our failure, Cian had taken the plunge headfirst into the adult world. The only one dragging her heels was me, and I couldn’t decide whether that was admirable or pitiable.

I hung, suspended in space, somewhere between Miach Mihie’s ghost and Cian Reikado’s innocence.

“Look, Cian, I’ve been overseas a long time, right? So I just don’t know the people who live around my home. I haven’t volunteered with them or gone to health meetings with them. I’m just not very connected to the community.”

I explained to her that being a globe-trotting Helix agent meant:

<list:item>

<i: dangerous working conditions>

<i: difficulty fitting in with social life in any one place>

<i: difficulty forming bonds with former neighbors or a medical community>

<i: an artificially high social assessment score given to make up for all that>

</list>

Because we lacked a conclave to assess us, the admedistration awarded us an arbitrary SA score in order to account for the inconsistency that resulted from doing something very important to the continuation of the admedistration’s lifestyle while, by necessity, being forced to operate independently of that admedistration.

“Oh. Really?”

“Really.”

As I was explaining my life to Cian, I couldn’t help but feeling that I had somehow become Miach. Miach explaining how to use a medcare unit to make a chemical weapon capable of killing fifty thousand people. Miach who could make a pill that would shut down your entire digestive tract.

Miach who could wear a cool smile as she told you she wanted to watch the world burn.

I felt like she must have back then, filled with knowledge no one else had, talking openly, brazenly, full of confidence, fearing nothing, giving every word a declaration.

Hey, Cian, did you know that if you install DummyMe, you can spoof your physical data before it gets sent to the server? Hey, Cian, did you know that you can do anything to yourself with DummyMe installed? Hey, Cian, have you heard about this… Hey, Cian… Say, Cian…

But instead of playing Miach’s doppelgänger, I merely smiled cynically and said, “The real reason they give me a score is because if they didn’t, I’d be labeled a sociopath.”

Cian frowned, not understanding. “So you’re not going home?”

“Probably not.”

Cian stepped in front of me. “Then let’s go get something to eat, at least. There’s this new building near where I live. It looks all bumpy and white from the outside, like it was made out of solid plaster. But when you go inside, you can see out. It’s this new intelligent material, a special light-refracting Styrofoam glass.”

“Sounds pleasant. I’m really not in the mood.”

“We could eat, and then you can come over to my house. It’s only eleven o’clock. How about lunch?”

I had an urge to check with the nonexistent Miach. “Want to go with me and Cian to get some lunch?”

I sighed and told her I’d go with her to lunch. Only lunch. I followed after Cian, getting into the first bean-shaped light yellow train that came sliding down the tracks. My WatchMe linked to my credit account, deducting the appropriate rail fee. I was just realizing how long it had been since I rode the subway in Japan when I looked around at the other passengers and felt a sudden fear grip me.

<panic>

                 They were all the same. Everyone.
    It hadn’t been so blatantly apparent on the battlefield. Working with an international group meant there were a lot of people from a lot of different places and races around all the time, and more than a few of them were indulging on the sly, like me.
    That was definitely not the case here.
For the first time, I realized how bizarre a sight the medically standardized Japanese populace presented. The difference between the couple sitting in the seats nearest to me was no more than the difference between mannequin A and mannequin B. Neither was too fat nor too skinny. Every person on the train conformed to a particular body type. Everyone fit within a healthy target margin. I felt like a stranger in a house of mirrors—a country of mirrors.
How had things come to this? How could everyone be the same when simple genetics told us everyone was different?

<maxim>

The more rigid and narrower the goal, the easier it will be for the weak to achieve.

</maxim>

Miach’s phantom again, whispering in my ear. Talking just like she always did when giving us a lecture. I remembered her saying how human will could grow rigid even while it succumbed to temptation.
Humans were like a broken meter whose needle swung back and forth between desire and willpower, always all or nothing, never lingering in between. There was no room for moderation. Even a pigeon had a will of its own. Volition just happened to be a good fit for vertebrates, which was why our brains kept it around.

</panic>

“Is something wrong? Do you feel unwell? Here, take my seat,” a woman offered, seeing the momentary fear caused by social panic flash across my face. My AR told me that she was a politician—a coordinator or commissioner for an admedistration somewhere—though her face looked no different from anyone else’s. She too was well within the margins. A healthy, standardized face. It was a feature—that is, the lack of distinct features—I assumed you would find even more the higher up you got in the chain of command. I remembered everyone at Geneva headquarters looking more or less the same.

“I’m okay,” I told the politician and went a short distance down the train car. Cian caught up to me, a worried look on her face.

“You shouldn’t have walked away like that. It’s rude. She’s an admedistration councilor somewhere.”

“I know. I saw the AR. Sorry.”

“I think you’re just exhausted from work, Tuan. It must be hard, doing all that. But you’re really making a contribution to society.”

Me, making a contribution to society.

Making a contribution by going to a battlefield where I could smoke.

Making a contribution by consciously choosing not to be part of society—where I undoubtedly would have either slashed my own wrists or cut into someone else a long time ago.

Which was how I was able to agree with Cian, without a trace of sarcasm, that I was indeed making a great contribution to society.

My path and Cian’s had diverged sharply after Miach’s death. For Cian, all the enmity she had felt toward society, her family, her hometown, and school had passed. For her it was like a rite of passage, a phase everyone went through before returning to a standardized life. For me, I had gone on collecting the knowledge I surely would have gotten from Miach were she still alive, and on the surface, I too appeared to be conforming, just like Cian. My grades kept climbing until I took Miach’s former place at the head of the class. In a sense, I had become Miach’s doppelgänger.I was becoming Miach Mihie.

Cian wasn’t becoming Miach. She was joining a club—a club at least nine out of ten Japanese belonged to. A club with tightly defined body fat ratios and stable immune systems and known RNA transcription error rates.

All while I went from party zone to party zone. Battlefield to battlefield.

From airport to airport.

Cigar to cigar.

Bottle to bottle.

Except this time, I’d gone from Château Petrus to insalata di caprese, in a place where there was little likelihood of seeing a single smoke or drink.

I had said goodbye to the depressing, dizzying subway and now sat enjoying a healthy meal in an Italian restaurant with my old friend.

There were slices of tomato burying water buffalo cheese that had been completely drained of fat, with a light sprinkling of olive oil on top. We were on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building. The meals here were noteworthy for each bearing a slight risk to the diner.

When you ordered a plate, the menu displayed your total calorie intake and any potential risk of chromosomal damage you might suffer from consuming the food. Every single item on the menu had a warning attached. Once you had read the risk information to your satisfaction, you could order what you wanted to eat, within the prescribed limits set for you by the health consultant on contract with your admedistration.

There were a few other people in the restaurant, but not too many. Everyone sitting around the marigold tablecloths were just like the people I had seen in the subway, each well within the margins of a healthy Japanese body.

<sentiment>

                 “It’s been a long time since we ate together,” Cian said, watching the server arrange our insalata. It occurred to me that since the day we had both tried to throw our lives away and failed, Cian and I hadn’t eaten together once.
    “No kidding.”
    “It’s a little strange, actually, being here with just the two of us.”
    I looked out the window at the view from the sixtysecond floor.
    The view that Miach wanted to mar.
    The view that Cian had gotten used to.
    The view I had escaped from.

</sentiment>

“Actually, I think this might be the first time we’ve ever eaten together without Miach. Just the two of us, I mean.”

“I think I ate alone with Miach a few times,” I said, “ before she brought you into things.”

“Yes, I think you’re right. You were friends before I met you, weren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t call us friends. We didn’t find each other. Miach pretty much grabbed me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I was walking along one day and she literally ran up and grabbed me. Remember the story about the jungle gym?”

“Oh, right.”

“Wasn’t it pretty much the same way with you, Cian? With me she asked me whether I knew why the jungle gym twisted and warped like it did.”

“Maybe she was casting a net.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, she was sitting in the park reading a book, right? Maybe she was waiting for someone to notice her? A girl like me or you.”

Miach, waiting for someone to notice her? Something about it didn’t fit with the image I had. Miach hated everything about healthy society. She hated how everyone worried about everyone else, offering help whether it was asked for or not. It didn’t make sense for her to want out of the system and then go looking for friends. I told Cian I didn’t agree.

“Huh? Why?”

“I just think you’re wrong about her. Miach wasn’t looking for friends, she was looking for kindred spirits—comrades in arms.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Not really. They’re both kinds of acquaintances, in a loose sense of the term, but the bond between kindred spirits isn’t friendship per se. It’s more like the bond between fellow soldiers.”

Picking up knife and fork, I cut off a bite-sized chunk from my insalata. Cian was looking at me, clearly trying to comprehend what I was saying and just as clearly failing.

“See, Miach didn’t want friendship,” I continued. “She wanted someone to fight by her side. You can’t fight a war alone, you know.”

“The more the merrier?”

“You bet. Of course, it’d be a lot easier if she could find someone who already shared a lot of the feelings she had about things. So you’re right in that she was lying in wait for us, just for a slightly different reason.”

“We weren’t really the soldiers she hoped we would be, were we, then. At least, I wasn’t.”

Cian was probably right. Miach clearly identified the enemy and charged ahead all by herself. We were basically no better than deserters.

If Miach had been saved as we had been, would she be sitting here today, eating lunch with us? Would she have a smile for her former soldiers who fled the front lines? I had no idea.

It was then that I noticed Cian looking at her plate with a strangely expressionless face. It was bizarre. Like her plate was a pool, and she was watching something swim at the bottom. Her eyes remained fixed on one spot, unmoving. I was about to ask what was wrong when Cian opened her mouth, her eyes still fixed on her caprese.

“I’m sorry, Miach,” she whispered, then suddenly, her table knife was in her hand. Before I had time to wonder what she was doing, Cian had thrust the tip of the knife into her own throat.

“Ehgu,” said a strange voice from Cian’s mouth.

<silence>

<surprise>

                 Summoning some strength I never would have imagined to be in her, she twisted the table knife inside her throat and brought it straight through her carotid artery and out one side. The knife couldn’t have been that sharp. Her strength was unbelievable. It was as if her neck had been a tree trunk, and she had cut halfway through it with one blow of a hatchet.
    Blood sprayed from her neck.
    The blood splattered all over the interior of the Italian restaurant on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building, painting the walls in patches of somber red. A shower of blood caught the server—who had just been coming to our table to fill our water glasses—directly in the face. He passed out.    >It all happened in a single, endless moment. All I could do was stare. Blood flowed down onto her plate, mingling, but not blending with, the olive oil dripping down from her salad.

</surprise>

</silence>

The other customers began to scream.

Just as, at that very moment, similar screams rose up across the globe.

Because, at that very same time, by a number of various means, 6,582 other people also tried to take their own lives.

</body>

<etml>