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

Harmony — LNCrawler · All chapters

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

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<flashback:repeat>

<re: I’m sorry, Miach.>

Cian, whispering in my memory.

Her last words on infinite repeat.

<re: I’m sorry, Miach.>

</flashback>

“We’ve confirmed 2,796 deaths,” the communications officer from Interpol explained. On the same day, at the same time, 6,582 people all attempted suicide, and a little less than half of them were successful.

I subtracted the number of successful suicides from the total number of attempts: 6,582 minus 2,796 equaled 3,786.

For 3,786 people, that fateful moment was less than fatal.

The communications officer in my AR projection was still talking. Apparently several of those involved who had survived their initial attempt eight hours ago were in critical condition, meaning the total death toll could still rise.

Those “involved.”

Apparently, it had taken Interpol and all the senior Helix agents participating in this AR gathering quite some time to decide exactly what to call them. Were they victims? Suicides? For so many to attempt to end their own lives at the same time, they had to have been under some kind of influence or had been, indeed, victims of some sort of coercion. Yet look at any one of the people in the resulting pile of corpses and you had to think they did it themselves, all on their own.

<public_opinion>

<i: Everyone agrees suicide is a selfish, shameless act.>

<i: —A direct assault on the body, a public resource.>

<i: —Stark evidence of an appalling lack of awareness of the public nature of one’s own body.>

<ex: As far as I’m concerned, if someone wants to off themselves, they’re welcome to it.>

</public_opinion>

Okay, people were allowed to grieve, fine. If one of my friends died, I’d grieve. But to sit back and judge someone else’s choice, someone completely unrelated to you—to talk about “public property” and “resource awareness” when someone just died to justify giving someone’s life a cold look? That was what I called arrogance, and I wanted no part of it.

Miach would have thought the same thing. Rather, Miach did think that.

But not the rest of the world.

The only reason the suicides weren’t punished was because they were dead.

Beyond the admedistration’s reach. Finally.

If someone were to come up with a way to effectively punish the dead, I’m sure the world wouldn’t hesitate. I knew the regimen of drugs and counseling awaiting the failed suicides—it would be an earnest attempt to reclaim the resources the “involved” very nearly squandered, to patch up these damaged goods and put them back on the assembly line. To reinstate them as the basic unit in the medical economy, so that they could fulfill their societal function as consumers. Cian and I knew how that went. Been there, done that.

Except Cian wouldn’t be coming back this time.

Suicide was an offense punishable by disdain. Even if it wasn’t technically a legal offense. I remembered Miach telling us how the Catholics buried their suicides in the middle of a crossroads as punishment for betraying God.

Admedistrative society, lifeist society, hadn’t quite figured out how to treat suicides yet. The gravediggers wanted to know if they were victims or perpetrators. So, uh, ma’am? Should we just go ahead and dig this hole in the crossroads here, just to be safe?

People had no idea what to do. I didn’t blame them. Lately, not even battlefields produced this many corpses. In lifeist society, it took old age, accidents, and the occasional, very rare homicide to result in a body. Otherwise, people just didn’t die. Cancer and other diseases were targeted in real time by WatchMe and removed. The all-important credo that was resource awareness helped us keep ourselves in check. Keep your WatchMe updated and your body fat ratio low.

The people who had killed themselves eight hours before were suspended in space over a chasm that ran between criminality on one side and victimhood on the other.

I participated in the Interpol/Helix session from my hotel room. The Helix Inspection Agency had called the AR meeting after determining that this event was something in which they should be involved. Clearly, a crime had been perpetrated against the highest value of our society—the very sanctity of life! Even though no one was sure exactly what the crime was, there was a general expectation that they would figure that out shortly to everyone’s satisfaction.

“Those involved,” the Interpol communications officer told us, came from twenty-five different countries, and all belonged to the Sukunabikona Medical Conclave, or Sukunabikona Admedistration, as it was more commonly called. The means by which they had killed themselves were varied:

<list:item>

<i: scissors>
<i: chopsticks>
<i: jumping off buildings>
<i: hanging themselves>
<i: cutting their wrists>
<i: chain saw>
<i: table knife>

</list>

And numerous other ways besides. It all made for a very impressive list of recipes for self-destruction.

The chain saw had been a guy in forest management. He had been in the middle of work and went from sawing through a tree to sawing off his own head. The one with the chopsticks had, in the middle of a meal, driven one chopstick through an eyeball and then twisted it around and around for good measure. It made sense that eating utensils took a prominent role in the list, since in every single confirmed case, the “involved” had simply picked up the nearest potentially lethal item they could find and gone for it.

<list:dialogue>

<d: Say, I could probably push this pin through my carotid artery.>
<d: My, this chain saw would be perfect for cutting off my head!>

<d: Huh, you think if I drove the chopsticks through my eye I could reach my brain?>

<d: Hmm, I daresay that rope is perfect for hanging oneself!>

</list>

As far as Cian’s method went, she was strictly by the book.

“This event is clearly an act of terrorism against admedistrative society!” the Helix agent next to me was saying. He was a senior inspector assigned to monitor elections in some war-torn hinterland. Of course, I say “next to me” but that was merely where the AR conferencing system had placed him. In reality, I was sitting all alone on my hotel room bed, talking to people who weren’t even there. If anyone had walked in and seen me they would have thought I had gone mad.

An act of terrorism. How perfect.

It was the kind of statement that sounded meaningful while being utterly pointless. You might even call it a waste of time, but in our lifeist society where harmony was valued above all else, no one smirked or shook their heads at my neighbor’s blatant grab for attention. Instead, they all nodded and muttered their agreement that yes, that had been a most insightful statement. They had to.

That was how you did things as an adult.

</boredom>

Maybe it was because I had seen one of my old friends become “involved” right before my eyes that this whole meeting felt like a charade. I didn’t have time to sit here listening to all these people blow smoke up each other’s asses. I waited the minimum amount of time necessary to not seem rude, then asked what condition those involved were in now.

The Interpol agent turned toward me. “All those who did not immediately die have fallen into a deep comalike state. At present, not one is available for questioning as to motives.”

“What about WatchMe?”

The question came from the Helix agent who had just been spouting off about terrorism. The Interpol agent turned, politely smiling at the man’s ignorance. “Though it is not widely known, WatchMe does not monitor the brain’s condition.”

“Really?” the agent asked, looking at me for some reason.

“Yes,” the Interpol agent said. “WatchMe cannot penetrate the blood-brain barrier. Apologies in advance if you already know this, but the blood-brain barrier is a feature in the body that limits the circulation of materials between tissue fluids—such as blood—and the brain. The barrier is there to protect the brain and spinal column from potentially dangerous substances, and no scientist has been able to develop a medicule able to pass through. Basically, it’s a blind spot in the system.”

“Doesn’t the blood-brain barrier work like a filter? Why can’t they just make a medicule smaller than the holes in the net?”

“Actually, the barrier is not like a net. Though in fact it was believed to be for quite some time. A century ago, the popular theory was that anything with a molecular mass of, oh, 500ì or less would be able to pass through, but that theory has since been entirely refuted. As it turns out, certain kinds of material, no matter what their size, cannot pass through the blood-brain barrier, while rather large molecules can pass through if they are needed by the brain. In other words, size doesn’t matter. The blood-brain barrier isn’t a mindless filter, it’s a highly attenuated and complex selection organ.”

The man looked down at his lap. “I see.”

I smiled. This was about the closest thing to a smackdown I was likely to see in one of these meetings.

“Though the numbers are small, there are a handful of instances every year of people with WatchMe installed dying of brain tumors and otherwise preventable hemorrhages. The brain is the last sanctum of the body, you might say. The only place where WatchMe’s eyes cannot go. That is, most of the brain. Because the pituitary gland and pineal gland deal with hormones, we can access them.

“Of course, we are doing what we can to monitor the coma patients externally via electronic scanning, though that falls far short of nano-level resolution,” the Interpol officer explained. “That said, only eight hours have passed since the…outbreak. We have, at present, no confirmation of any brain abnormalities in those affected, but it is still quite early in the day, so to speak.”

I saw Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg stand. She was probably still in her pink tent in the Sahara. For a second, I felt like she might be glaring at me, but I was too busy ignoring her to see.

Would Cian have killed herself if Prime hadn’t sent me packing from the Sahara? Would Cian really have stuck a knife into her own throat if I hadn’t been sent back to Japan to go to lunch with her and watch her do it?

Or would she have done it anyway, with a knife she was using to cut tomatoes in her own kitchen?

Want to fill a bathroom with poison gas? Beyond easy.

</memory>

Hadn’t Miach said something like that?

<maxim>

Every person holds within themselves the potential to take another’s life.

</maxim>

I’ve got the power.

I could kill someone.

Even myself.

Each of us holds within us the power to destroy something important.

Had Cian killed herself, after a thirteen-year delay, just to truly understand the meaning of Miach’s words for herself? Was I to be the only one left behind?

“In two hours from now at a general emergency meeting of WHO in Geneva, I will be addressing all admedistrations and telling them that this, this chaos, is evidence of a full-on attack against lifeism,” Prime announced.

“As senior inspectors, all of you will be cooperating with security in your local regions. You all know about the treaties binding each admedistration to WHO—we’re going to make them honor those treaties. I want each of you to take the initiative in rooting out the people responsible for this, and let them know we will not sit idly by while they threaten our very way of life.”

Every agent in the room nodded. Like that, the session ended, and I was back in my hotel room, surrounded by unpacked bags.

Unlike the other inspectors, I didn’t have much time. I had to start right now.

Just two hours earlier, our fearless leader Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg had opened a secure session in AR with me.

<scorn>

“Though it is not public knowledge, you are under house arrest. Add to that the fact that you witnessed one of the people involved take her own life, and it is clear that you cannot be allowed to be involved in the upcoming investigation. Let us not forget that as a recent victim of an emotionally traumatic experience, you have likely sustained psychological damage. Most admedistration ordinances dictate that any conclave member who has experienced a dramatic ordeal must submit themselves to a minimum of one hundred twenty hours of psychiatric counseling and drug therapy. Your presence will not be required at the emergency meeting of Helix inspectors to be called in two hours time.”

</scorn>

I laughed. Of course I should be involved with the investigation. And seeing my friend kill herself was emotional trauma? Really? If I’d suffered an emotional trauma, it was when I failed to die at the age of fifteen. No, it had been when I tried to kill myself by overeating, long before I met Miach Mihie. Don’t talk to me about psychological damage. I’ve been damaged for years.

<laugh>

But I didn’t say that. Instead I saluted Prime Inspector Stauffenberg and informed her that I would happily use my newfound free time to work on my press release informing the media just how many of us in the Niger armistice monitoring camp had collaborated in acts of shameless, wanton indulgence.

</laugh>

She had asked me if I was serious.

“Deadly serious.”

<i: Confession, part I>
<d: For over half a year, we copied immunization patches off an admedistration server without authorization and provided them to the Tuareg, who were involved in an armed conflict at the time.>

<i: Confession, part II>
<d: In return for providing this, we received crates filled with shamefully harmful substances, such as alcohol, tobacco products, and, once, even hallucinogens.>

<i: Confession, part III>
<d: We installed copies of DummyMe, available on the black market, and used them to spoof our physical data in order to deceive the health consultant server.>

</press release>

I wanted everyone living in every admedistration across the world to know exactly what we did, even if that revelation should happen to take the fragile state of truce between the Nigerians and the Kel Tamasheq and throw it off a cliff, leading to the loss of countless lives and the complete gutting of the Helix Inspection Agency as it lost all authority in the aftermath.

Also, I added, if my memory serves, due to the nature of our work in conflict zones, Helix agents are given a five-day reprieve before they are required to report to mandatory therapy following a traumatic incident, ma’am.

I was satisfied to see a shiver run through Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg as the sheep’s clothing came off her misguided, insubordinate underling. Clearly, she was wondering how someone with such a deeply flawed character could have sneaked her way into the upper ranks of an elite division of WHO.

Except I knew she wasn’t trembling at me. She was trembling at the unseen, unnamed specter of Miach Mihie standing right behind me. At times like this, I often felt like it was Miach’s words coming out of my mouth.

I counted roughly thirty seconds of rage, regret, and hesitation passing before Prime spoke again.

“Fine. You will participate in the investigation.”

I nodded, satisfied.

“However,” she added, “though you may have a reprieve, don’t dream you’re getting out of therapy. Not even I could do that. Five days from now, you will be placed in an emergency morality center to undergo a full therapeutic regimen.”

This was about the worst that Prime Inspector Stauffenberg could threaten me with, and nothing she was saying was news. Unfortunately, she was right. The mandatory therapy requirement would be a very hard one to get out of. In five days’ time they’d toss me in an emergency morality center somewhere, pile on the kindness and thoughtfulness until I couldn’t breathe, and when I cried uncle they’d keep me in their benevolence-stained sweatshop a few weeks more just for good measure. As long as I was a member of an admedistration, there was no way around it.

I had five days. I only hoped that would be enough time to figure out why Cian had died.

</recollection>

<movie:ar:id=6aehko908724h3008k>

That day, found the perfect rope in his storage closet.

The image was completely’s POV, so I couldn’t actually see him, though I knew what his face looked like from a little data window in the lower right-hand corner of my field of vision.

Ichiro Tokume; life pattern designer; 38.

These were the people that designed how other people should live. It was a branch of health consulting.

They would look at your hormonal balance, blood sugar levels, CRP, GTP—the works, all supplied by WatchMe— then determine a lifestyle pattern to optimize both their client’s health and their social assessment score. They would devise lifestyle “recipes” that told their clients what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; what sports they should participate in; and the most efficient place for them to go to volunteer in their free time.

Planning out someone’s daily life.

Planning out someone’s life.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Ichiro Tokume himself were following a life design given him by some other health consultant. That was how you lived in our postconsumer society.

Now this life planner was deftly working his fingers, holding the rope up where he could see it, and tying a knot to make a loop. Somehow, I didn’t think what he was doing had anything to do with his hormonal balance or GTP or any of that.

Next he walked into the kitchen where he found a small stool—probably something his wife stood on when she needed to reach the top cupboards. I watched him pick it up and return to the living room where he had been tying his rope. There he stood on the stool and began looping the other end of the rope around a light fixture in the middle of the ceiling.

Again his field of vision lowered as he stepped down and began to walk through the house toward the bathroom. (I wonder what he’s up to?) I watched him turn on the water, then everything went dark as he closed his eyelids. (He’s washing his face.) When he next opened his eyes, Ichiro Tokume was wiping his face with a towel. I caught a glimpse of his expression in the mirror for only a moment.

Not a trace of emotion.

Empty eyes, open mouth. Three empty holes.

Back to the living room. The noose was swaying gently from the ceiling. As he stepped up onto the stool he looked down at his feet, then back up. The noose encircled my field of vision and then was gone, around Ichiro Tokume’s neck. My field of vision shook violently.

Now we were swaying back and forth, looking out at the living room interior. A soft-pink sofa. A screen on one wall. Intelligent wall material made to look like plaster. We turned a full circle around the pivot of the rope, as though Ichiro wanted me to see where he lived with his wife. Everything was recorded.

Come in, come see my home!

This is the living room. This is where I hang myself.

Of course, I was merely watching what his AR contact lenses had recorded. Ichiro Tokume, age thirty-eight, had expired when the full weight of his body had pulled at the vertebrae in his neck. If I’d wanted to, I could have watched the feed until his body stopped providing its electrical current to the lenses and it went dark—a nice natural stopping point to the record of his last few minutes on earth.

</movie>

First-person POV suicide flicks.

Of the 6,582 cases, 2,049 had been wearing AR contact lenses when they did the deed. The last things they saw remained on the server, giving us close-up front-row seats to their deaths.

AR contacts monitor focus points, and I wanted to see what Ichiro Tokume had been looking at. A cursor blipped around the screen, highlighting wherever his eyes went. The objects and angle of view were then listed up and run through several formulas to analyze Mr. Tokume’s mental state in the ten minutes leading up to lights out. The results, displayed in bold on another screen, were nothing surprising.

Severe depressive tendencies.

Suicidal tendencies.

I decided to watch a hundred more similar movies at 3x speed. Each was about twelve minutes long. Divided by three times one hundred equaled four hundred minutes.

I plugged in the commands and sat back, for just under seven hours, to watch the deaths of one hundred people randomly selected from 2,049, back to back.

My database of suicide movies.

I couldn’t imagine anything other than a mass, unexplained suicide requiring the creation of such a morbid collection.

Each person in the database had only ten minutes’ worth of footage, the reason being that all had taken action so swiftly. It was like each of them had parents who had told them to never put off for tomorrow what could be done today, and they listened. The logger in Canada had been cutting through a particularly large pine tree when he suddenly pulled out the chain saw and cut through his own neck. I watched his field of vision lurch, then fall until it was rolling across a bed of matted decaying leaves.

The scene changed to the next victim.

<movie:ar:id=8dhkie470267k9948s>

I was looking at my own face, from another time and place. My breath stopped.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall.

She had been among a random selection of a hundred victims.

I was staring at me. A dead person was staring at me.

I looked at myself, Tuan Kirie, through the eyes of my friend who, in a matter of minutes, would stick a table knife through her own throat and paint the walls of the restaurant with her blood.

My face. Skin tanned a little by the ultraviolet rays of the Sahara.

What a grotesque mirror.

The Italian restaurant on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building.

The field of vision went from my face down to the bright red and fresh white slices on her plate—the insalata we’d both ordered. I noticed everything was moving at normal speed and realized I must have flicked off the fast forward without even realizing it. The cursor told me Cian was focusing on the red slices of tomato and brilliant white slices of mozzarella layered atop them.

“I’m sorry, Miach.”

</horror>

That was what Cian would be saying any second now.

I heard the words moments after anticipating them.

Cian’s attention shifted to the table mats, and I saw her healthy arm and hand, neither fat nor slim, slide into view. The hand grabbed the knife to the right of her dish, gripping the handle with the blade pointing down, while I stared. A waiter walked up to fill my glass of water—

<limit:patience>

I switched off the AR.

</limit>
</fear>
</silence>
</movie>

My lungs were screaming for air, my brain for oxygen. I had forgotten to start breathing again.

The sound of my heaving breaths filled the conference room of the WHO Japan branch I was using for my little viewing session.

Thankfully, I was alone in the room. I had been the only Helix agent in Japan when the event occurred, which was lucky for me. This way I wouldn’t be obliged to cooperate with any other agents.

Maybe I should go in for immediate therapy. Maybe I should go to some emergency morality center with white cotton walls to escape from the words that had spilled from Cian’s mouth.

Calm down. Steady breaths.

Don’t you want to find out why Cian died? Didn’t you blackmail your boss just for a chance to find out what your friend’s last words meant? So you saw yourself looking at your friend just before she died, so what? You’re breathing heavy just because you remembered a few words?

I’m sorry, Miach.

And then something occurred to me.

Of my one hundred randomly chosen victims, Cian had been the only one to say something as she died. Why was she the only one to leave last words? Were those even “last words,” as we like to think of them, or just something she happened to say? My selection had been truly random, and while it had been just a coincidence that Cian’s name was on the list, I found it hard to believe that the other ninety-nine people’s not saying anything before committing suicide, or even leaving a note, had also been a coincidence.

“Go through all the records and pull out just the ones containing the subject’s voice,” I told the database. This got me a few results, all mundane snippets of daily conversation with family or friends, none of which seemed connected in any way to the optimal methods of suicide they were about to employ.

I’m sorry, Miach.

Which left Cian Reikado as the exception. The only one with something to say.

That something being the name of the girl who had died, leaving us cowardly deserters behind.

≡

I had returned to that place Miach called the “suburb of the soul.” Back to an endless, boring future of connected blocks, their nanomaterial plaster walls painted in light pastels.

I took an automag from the hotel. I didn’t care to experience the horror of the subway again, nor did I feel like going back to my own home. I was here to visit Miach Mihie’s parents.

I’m sorry, Miach.

I couldn’t exactly go to the police or Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg and tell them that the trigger for 6,582 people across the world taking their lives had been those words—words important only to myself, Cian, and Miach. They wouldn’t believe me.In fact, they’d probably recommend me for immediate therapy.

I wasn’t sure I would be able to explain why I was going to find Miach’s parents. Certainly not because one of 6,582 people had mentioned her name before committing suicide.

Truth be told, I didn’t really believe me either. I had come here on the strength of a clue you could barely call a clue, a gut feeling that was hardly reliable enough to call a gut feeling, and an emotion that was something like fear—fear of the ghost of Miach Mihie. In a world where everything was public property, my reason was so private it was almost lewd.

Through the lens of AR, everyone in the world wore their

<list:item>

<i: name>
<i: age and occupation>
<i: social assessment score>
<i: current state of health>

</list>

on their sleeve. Focus for any amount of time on someone you saw in the street, and a box of data would appear by their head, telling you everything you could possibly want to know about them. In lifeist society, where it was considered a moral obligation to reveal personal information, especially that concerning one’s health, the very word private had the illicit stench of secrecy to it.

≡

So it was that I found myself on a solo investigation, using the authority granted me by the Geneva Convention as a Helix agent to the fullest extent. Miach Mihie’s parents had moved several months after their daughter died, but it did not take me long to track down their new residence.

The neighborhood was one of those admedistration collectives with security cameras monitoring all passersby. At the entrance to the zone, you had to switch from whatever mode of transport you had used to get there to a collective-provided magcar. I stepped out of the car and walked up to the front door of the house, then pressed my index finger to the fingerplate.

“Hey, Tuan, did you know that people used to hit doors with their hands?”

Miach’s voice in my memory.

“There used to be no way to tell who was standing outside your door at all. Some people installed little fisheye lenses on their doors, but that was about the limit of the technology. Not that being in the dark about the people around you was any big deal back then—there weren’t ubiquitous personal information displays all the time half a century ago. These days, you just touch the plate on the door and all your info is posted to the AR of the person inside on their wall or something, but they didn’t have any way of doing that before.”

“So they just hit the door? That’s so, I don’t know, primitive,” Cian said.

“It was the easiest way to announce their presence to whoever was inside. They called it ‘knocking.’ You used your knuckles, like this.” Miach demonstrated on the classroom wall. “When a person inside heard the knocking, they would shout out ‘Who is it?’ and the person on the outside would shout back ‘It’s so-and-so from such-and-such.’ And the person inside just had to take them at their word. So, if you think about it, every time you opened your door, you were taking a little risk.”

Cian and I nodded enthusiastically, starry-eyed at the seemingly limitless font of knowledge that was Miach Mihie.

“But you got to think people are getting tired of this telling-everyone-who-they-are-all-the-time business. What a drag it is to have to show you’re healthy and you’re taking care of yourself all the time. We’re tired of it, right? People shouldn’t have to walk around with labels over their heads, proving every minute and every second exactly who they are to the world.”

“Say, Tuan—”

Another memory.

“You know privacy didn’t used to be such a naughty word.”

I shook my head, eyes flitting around the room. I couldn’t believe she had just said that word here in class, in the middle of the day.

Not that Miach ever cared who heard her proclamations.

“It was because,” she continued, oblivious, “information about yourself used to be available only to yourself and a few others. That’s what privacy meant. But now, everything that used to be private is public, so the only thing ‘private’ these days is sex. Now, why do you think that happened, Cian?”

Cian shrugged her shoulders.

For some reason, a light went off in my head at that moment. “It’s like we’ve offered ourselves to the rest of the world as hostages to guarantee our own good behavior,” I said eagerly.

Miach smiled. “That’s right, Tuan, it’s just like that.”

I remember feeling a little elation at having said something to please her.

“It’s just like Tuan says. By letting everyone else know every little detail about ourselves, we’re making sure we can’t get away with anything. Give up your erratic free will as a hostage to everyone else in society and you’re guaranteed to keep things safe and peaceful.”

This was how Miach dispensed wisdom, little by little, to us little girls in the corner of a classroom, explaining to us exactly why we were so frustrated and why we felt like we didn’t belong.

Thinking back on it now, I’m amazed it never occurred to me at the time to wonder what sort of people Miach’s parents were. I had never met them, and I didn’t remember Miach ever talking about them.

Eventually, I had told Miach who my dad was, that he had written the thesis that led to WatchMe, that he had contributed significantly to the world we despised.

All Miach had said was “huh.”

She hadn’t lost it. She hadn’t hated me. She had hardly reacted at all.

</recollection>

Now I found I really was curious what kind of parents it took to raise a girl who could smile while she daydreamed out loud about using a household medcare unit to kill fifty thousand people. I removed my finger from the plate and waited quietly for an answer.

“Might I ask what sort of business a member of an international organization has with us?” the door said, breaking the silence and snapping me out of my reverie fully back into the present.

“I’m with the Helix Inspection Agency—I suppose you saw that from my ID. We’re an investigative branch of WHO. I was hoping I could talk to you for a moment concerning the multiple suicides in the Sukunabikona Conclave yesterday.”

The door opened and a woman emerged. She looked to be in her late fifties. It was Reiko Mihie, Miach’s mother.

Her face held none of Miach’s twisted willfulness, that “dark illumination” for lack of a better term—none of her eccentric vitality. Instead, her face was like that of every other admedistration member, like the people I had seen on the subway upon my return to Japan. They were healthy but lifeless, if that made any sense. Compared to the Kel Tamasheq whose bodies, wrapped in indigo, practically shimmered with a vitality that sprang from their deep history, the people living in this country were like walking corpses.

That’s progress, said the Miach Mihie living inside me.The more advanced a people became, the closer they grew to death.

</disappointment>

“Of course I’m happy to help in any way that I can. I’m just not sure what that would be.”

“I wanted to ask you about your daughter, Miach.”

A cloud passed over Reiko’s face. I saw confusion in her eyes.

“My daughter has been gone—dead—for more than ten years now. I’m sorry, but I don’t see the connection.”

“Yes, I’m aware of this,” I said, marveling that this woman didn’t appear to remember her daughter’s friend, or that I had taken an oath to kill myself with her. That I had been one of three foolish little girls.

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about your daughter before her death.”

The mother’s eyes dropped like she was scanning the depths of her memory, looking for something she’d lost a long time ago. “Well, this is hardly a pleasant story, but when my daughter was a child, she often tried to take her own life. She slashed her wrists on several occasions.”

“I’m aware of that too. It’s in our records,” I lied.

Reiko, I was there with her. I would have followed her all theway down to hell. “I’m also aware,” I said, “that she tried to kill herself by eating too much, and then by not eating at all. As though she were trying to damage her own precious body precisely because it was so precious.”

From the woman’s expression I knew I had hit the mark. And it was true. We had tried to die because they told us our bodies were a public resource, because they kept telling us our bodies didn’t belong to us.

“We loved her, truly we did. We wanted her to grow up healthy, to make a contribution to society. But we failed. She was always cleverer than we were by far, and stronger, and yet, at the same time, fragile—a delicate little girl.”

“So what happened?”

“It’s kind of a long story. Maybe you should come inside,” Reiko said, drawing away from the door. She led me into an extremely average living room, motioned for me to sit on a sofa, and disappeared into the kitchen, asking as she went if I liked the smell of lavender. I made some noncommittal grunts, not really having an opinion on the subject.

“Here,” she said upon her return and handed me a glass of water. I took it. It did smell like lavender. This was a recent trend—using your medcare unit to add scents to drinking water. It probably had something to do with the whole aromatherapy concept that smells could help generate a feeling of calm.

A good 80 percent of admedistrative society was this: pastel pink buildings and lavender scents.

“So, you tried to help her, and what happened?” I asked Reiko as she sat down across from me. The woman who had once been Miach’s mother—I suppose that technically she still was—turned her eyes toward the twisted branches of a palmetto growing outside the window.

“Miach was adopted. Maybe you remember the admedistration campaign to adopt war orphans to counterbalance the problem of our aging society? There were those posters: ‘The best resource of all is our youth.’ We had tried to have a child of our own, but I was told by the doctor that my body couldn’t produce children. When my husband and I imagined the long lives ahead of us, thanks to WatchMe, just years of gradually growing old, it seemed so…flat, so homogeneous. How horrible, we thought, and how sad. Maybe you remember the conflict in Chechnya?”

I told her it was still going on.

“Is that so? Well, that’s where Miach was from. She was the child of a minority group there, a very small community, the admedistration official told us. Their facial features resemble ours quite a lot, and she was only eight years old when we got her, so they told us she wouldn’t have any problem getting used to our family and our way of life. All of which was very good news to us. They did mention she’d seen some pretty rough times, but that she’d gone through heavy therapy for her trauma already, and all we needed to do was provide a warm, loving home for her.”

Miach, a war orphan? I was sure she’d never said anything about that. And neither I nor Cian ever doubted she was Japanese. She spoke fluently, and though she’d had a certain exotic beauty to her features, they fit well within the margins of Japanese variation.

</surprise>

In the course of my work I’d had several opportunities to meet child soldiers—one of the many scenes AI social filtering kept out of the admedistration media due to a risk of trauma to viewers.

I remembered them in one of the many African countries I visited, carrying the customary AK-47s and a few M-4s from America. Children. Their country was sluggishly transitioning from an antiquated government to an admedistrative system, but there were still armed factions here and there, and the embers of conflict still smoldered.

We were at the negotiation table across from a twelve-year-old boy. A boy who happened to be the leader of an armed force 140 strong—I won’t call them “men” because they were boys too. His boys’ eyes were blank as they looked over the firepower we were offering them in exchange for their cigarettes and drugs.

Chechnya I’d never been to, but I’d heard plenty of rumors.According to the Helix inspector for the region, the military goods dealer on contract with the Geneva Convention forces there had made a mess of the place with various abuses of the law, only serving to increase the small republic’s hatred and distrust of its larger neighbors.

And Miach had been there, in the middle of that tragedy. I knew the crimes that children experienced in war zones. Now I considered the possibility that Miach had seen or experienced many of them herself. For the first time I had learned that Miach was carrying something inside her, a darkness she hadn’t told anyone—not even her coconspirators. The fact that she had come from such a hell on earth made her hatred of the admedistrative world—which must have seemed heavenly by comparison—all the more impressive.

“At first she was fine. Everything was normal. But when she got into middle school, it was like she became someone else, possessed almost. She started trying to kill herself. I told you how she attempted to cut her wrists. Well, eventually she found a way to hurt herself without anyone knowing. She came by these drugs—I don’t know where—that stopped the body’s absorption of nutrition from food. She and some of her friends made a pact that they would kill themselves that way.”

I was one of those friends.

I was that little girl who failed thirteen years ago and hadn’t forgotten it for a moment since.

I and Miach and Cian had taken those pills together in order to strike a blow against the world that had tried to suffocate us by making us too important to be lost. We wanted to hurt the world, and we were willing to hurt ourselves to do it. Well, some of us, at least.

</confession>

Of course, I said nothing. All I had to do at that point to keep her talking was nod at the appropriate times and occasionally ask a suitably leading question.

“Of course, even when they took the drugs, it still looked like they were eating well. I didn’t notice anything. Nor did the parents of the other girls. By the time I did realize something was wrong, Miach had already passed the point of no return.”

The woman’s eyes fell to her lavender-scented water. “You must think I’m a terrible mother, not to realize my own child was dying before my very eyes.”

“No, not at all—”

“No, it’s all right. It’s the truth, after all.” She chewed her lip.

“But, I ask you, what can a parent do when their child does something we can’t even imagine?” Tears glistened in Reiko Mihie’s eyes. “I know that sounds like an excuse, but we really did everything we could to be good parents to her. We went to get advice from the morality center and asked for help from our admedistrative community.The community people were very kind and held several sessions on our behalf.”

Was that all you could think of? I thought, cringing inwardly. It was the usual protocol: if a kid had problems, smother them with goodwill until they no longer thought for themselves, or thought anything at all.

Miach didn’t have to do much to find herself well beyond the limitations of this woman’s small, frail imagination.

“Every time we tried a new approach, Miach seemed to just slip through our hands like sand, drifting off in some other direction. The pain she was suffering was beyond our ability—no, beyond the whole admedistration’s ability to comprehend. She was in pain for reasons we couldn’t even imagine, screaming in perfect silence.”

</passion>

To be honest, I hadn’t been ready for the woman’s pained confession.

Even though, as a Helix agent, I was used to negotiating with admedistrations, the few big governments that refused to die, and the armed factions, I had no tools to deal with this kind of outpouring of raw emotion.

This was the kind of scene you expected in therapy sessions run by the admedistration community and the morality center. The world where everyone knew everything about everyone else. There was no shame in showing your emotions there. Everyone welcomed your grief with a smile and set about debating how to fix things on your behalf.A terrifying thought, I know.

That was the world I had fallen from, hard. The world from which I was estranged.

Confronted with the mother’s confession, I realized just how much of an outcast I was from Japan—no, from the entirety of the advanced admedistrative world.

</disturbed>

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t get emotional about this after so much time.”

“No, please don’t apologize.”

Miach’s mom shook her head. “I have to. My WatchMe just warned me my emotional state was beyond acceptable parameters for interfacing with others.”

“Ah, the public correctness monitoring module?”

“It’s a real lifesaver, having another pair of eyes inside me to help me through these things.”

A lifesaver, eh? Her WatchMe medicules had been monitoring her pulse and hormonal balance and noticed an aberration in her physical—and therefore mental—state, which it informed her of by sending an alert to her AR contacts. In other words, WatchMe was very subtly guiding not only her body but her mannerisms as well. It was the outsourcing of self-control. We didn’t have to worry about our own mental state if we could have something external measure everything for us. The invention of medicules had put the human body and moral precepts side by side on the same lab table.

And here this person was accepting as a perfectly natural part of her daily life the very precepts that Miach had railed against and even felt gratitude for the technology—though for all I knew, she might have secretly abhorred it. The program took signals sent from the body and transmitted morals in return. It was the kind of thing I detested with all my being.

No doubt Miach had felt much the same way.

It was one thing we shared, pure hatred toward the moral code over 80 percent of the people in the world had taken for their own.

“I was going to mention that on my way here, I thought I would stop by Miach’s grave and offer her some flowers, but I noticed she hadn’t been buried in the family plot. Based on what you’ve told me, am I right to assume that you returned her remains to Chechnya?”

The mother shook her head and, after taking a moment to compose herself, said, “No. Miach had, on her own initiative, signed a waiver donating her remains to science. It’s not such an unusual practice since the Maelstrom.”

After that chaotic time of rampant war, cancer, and viruses, the idea that offering your body to science was one of the most admirable things a citizen could do gained wide acceptance, until it was fairly common practice to include a medical donation in your will. Even though not a single governmental law or admedistrative article enforced or even suggested it, the custom to give one’s body to science still remained a popular one.

“And you didn’t put the liquid reduction of her remains in the grave either?”

“No—we gave those to a certain university professor. And that was her wish too. Someone in that city in the Middle East, the medical bubble place they always talk about, where all the admedistrations have their research labs—”

“You mean Baghdad.”

When the nation known as the United States had been the premier global power, back at the beginning of the century, the region around Baghdad had been a festering, war-torn shambles. But now it was like a medical mecca risen from the sands, the place where every medical organization with any clout wanted to have their headquarters.

“Yes, that’s the place, Baghdad. A researcher at one of the institutions there specifically requested Miach’s remains.”

“Could you tell me who this person was?”

“Yes. His name was Mr. Kirie. Nuada Kirie.”

I had no idea why my father’s name should come up now—my father who had chosen to leave his family for the protective shell of a research laboratory. The doubts that had been troubling me flared into full-blown chaos. Of course, my years of dealing with powerful military men and gangbangers in various unstable regions had taught me not to show fear or confusion on my face, and I didn’t now.

Nuada Kirie.

Funny that he had left me and my mother behind to devote himself to his research so soon after my failed attempt to die along with Cian and Miach.

</surprise>
</silence>

“Why, that’s your name too, isn’t it? Could he be a relative of yours?”

“Not that I’m aware of. You wouldn’t happen to have his contact information, would you?”

“Yes, well, unfortunately I’m unable to contact Mr. Kirie. Something to do with lab security.”

“You mean you gave your only daughter’s remains to someone and now you can’t contact them? Not at all?” I asked, frowning a bit exaggeratedly. It occurred to me that making a show of putting some pressure on this woman might loosen her tongue.

“No, well…” she said.

“You do have a way of contacting him.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, though I was told not to tell anyone.”

“Don’t worry. I’m an investigator for an international organization. Legally speaking, our authority exceeds that of any medical industrial body.”

“Well, Mr. Kirie has an associate here in Japan. A man by the name of Saeki.”

Keita Saeki. Another familiar name. Another person I knew.

<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>

“So, why were you friends with Miach, Cian?”

We were on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building, waiting for our insalata di caprese. Cian seemed surprised by my question at first. Then she was silent, a thoughtful look on her face. I decided to wait patiently for her answer. It took a while, but before too long she nodded as though she had come to some sort of decision.

“You know the thing with the drug, the one that cuts off nutrition. I was the one who ratted us out. I told my parents.”

Nothing. No anger. Our suicide pact felt like ancient history by that point, the act of three little girls thirteen years ago, bound together only by a shared hatred of the world. Years later, I could think about it pretty objectively, and I honestly couldn’t blame Cian for bailing.

“No kidding.”

“You’re not angry?”

“Come on, we were kids. It’d take way too much effort to be angry with you now.” I smiled and urged Cian to keep talking, not realizing at the time where that conversation would lead.

“Thanks.”

“I guess I should thank you. You saved my life.”

“No. I betrayed both of you. And I couldn’t save Miach.”

“You shouldn’t carry that one around with you. Don’t. I want to hear the rest of this story.”

Cian fell silent again. I figured she had a lot of pieces to put together before she could even talk about these things— things she’d probably never told a soul before now.

“See,” she said at last, “I stopped taking them, the pills. After only a day or two. I was scared. I felt myself getting thin and weak for the first time. I didn’t have WatchMe installed back then of course, none of us did, but my parents had a health consultant that put together a life plan for all of us. The medcare unit kept us in tip-top shape all the time. I mean, I’d never even had a headache at that point.”

“Same with me.”

“I guess I realized for the first time how much it could hurt to live. I could feel myself alive, and changing. I wasn’t eternal or permanent, you know? ‘This is life,’ I thought. ‘This pain is proof I’m alive.’ And when I thought that, I got so scared. I have a life, I am life.”

“I…think I know what you mean.”

“That’s why I stopped taking the pills. Of course I couldn’t tell you or Miach. Which meant I couldn’t tell anyone. By the time I realized I had to and went to my parents, it was already too late.”

Tears were forming in Cian’s eyes. Thirteen years. For thirteen years she’d held all of this inside. How hard that must have been. It wasn’t the kind of thing a session or two of therapy could make right.

“Hey, it’s not your fault, Cian.”

“I know that. I mean, I should know that. But I don’t.”

“Well, it should be enough to know that there’s at least one person who’s grateful you did what you did, and she’s sitting right here. Believe me, I’m glad I’m still alive.”

“Heh. Okay. Thanks.”

“Maybe we should talk about something else.”

I was starting to worry. Everything I’d said was the truth. I really was grateful to Cian. I was still alive thanks to her, and being alive meant I could still hurt myself with cigars and tobacco and alcohol. Not that I could say any of that in public.

“No, it’s okay. I want to talk about this.” Cian wiped away a stray tear and took a deep breath to steady herself. “Looking back on it now, I think I felt like I had to be with Miach. That’s why I hung out with her.”

“Had to be?”

“It’s like, I thought of myself as a counterbalance. I was having a tough time with the world back then too, just like you and Miach. I felt suffocated all the time, like I didn’t have a place to go. There was just too much, I don’t know, love in the world, and it was strangling me. They kept telling me what an important resource I was to society and I kept thinking ‘No, I’m not. How could that possibly be true?’”

“That’s what Miach always said, wasn’t it. ‘We aren’t resources! We have to prove we don’t have any value at all!’”

Cian nodded. “Yeah, and I agreed with her, I really did— but I didn’t think that meant we had to kill somebody or die ourselves. For all that Miach and I saw eye to eye, I couldn’t follow her all the way to that conclusion. But when I looked at Miach, I knew she could. I knew she’d go right up to the edge.”

“So you thought you would balance that. I get it.”

“That’s right. I thought if I was there with her, I could hold her back. I could keep Miach from going too far. I would just listen to everything she said, and nod, and agree, and it would be enough for her just to have an audience, you know? She wouldn’t actually have to do any of the things she always talked about. Of course, it didn’t work out like that. In the end I was just a coward, and Miach was dead.”

I felt like I had, for the first time, touched a little of the pain this woman must have carried inside her for the last thirteen years. I think I know what you mean, I’d told her. I didn’t know shit. The pain Cian had carried was deep, harsh, and she had carried it all alone for more than a decade.

Cian hadn’t been a hanger-on. I’d had her all wrong. She had been stronger than any of us, and more noble, and more alone. All alone.

Miach and I, we were little girls, but Cian Reikado had been an adult.

“That’s amazing, Cian. I could never have been that strong.”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t strong. I was too scared to do anything else.”

Cian leaned back, the view from the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building stretching out behind her, as the waiter arrived carrying sliced tomatoes and mozzarella cheese on two white plates.

“Caprese’s here,” Cian said. “It’s been a long time since we ate together.”

</recollection>

≡

They closed the lid on Cian’s coffin while the procession watched.

As was the custom, the family had chosen a gentle, light pink for the coffin. Like they could paint over the horrible, illogical shock of losing someone so abruptly in an age when everyone was supposed to live forever. Most of the people in the procession wore light yellow and emerald green in mourning. The ceremony had been brief. Cian’s cold body would now be carried by hearse to the local reduction facility. I watched the family procession leave the community center. I had no desire to go to the factory. I didn’t think I’d be able to stand there and wait for the reduction process to finish. I was out of time as it was. I had to figure out why Cian had died before they dragged me off to therapy.

The factory, the melting pot, the reduction center.

It was a relic from the time of the mutant viruses after the nukes dropped.

The bodies of the dead were reduced with a protein liquefier, and the resulting goop was further processed to remove any possibility of viral or bacterial transmission. The processing plant of the dead. A reminder of more chaotic times that had lived on for over half a century now. From a law-enforcement perspective, it was a pain in the ass. You couldn’t use medicules to analyze someone’s brain once it’d been liquefied.

Back during the Maelstrom, when mutant plagues ran rampant, corpses were nothing more than disease vectors to be eliminated as quickly as possible. Corpses started new outbreaks, and merely scorching the flesh wasn’t enough. The custom that arose under those conditions became the norm, which meant that bodies these days were dealt with as soon as possible. After an extremely brief autopsy to determine cause of death, the body would be subjected to protein reduction and that was it.

While it was still possible to use imaging to examine a corpse after the fact, there was no time to use medicules to investigate anything on the nano level.

“Goodbye, Cian. And thank you,” I muttered toward the hearse as it drove away from the funeral home. A soft breeze against my face was Cian’s answer. I felt like crying for a little while after that, but I stood and watched the car until I could no longer see it. Our friend. She had watched over us. She had saved my life. And she had suffered for it for years.

Maybe she was the kind of comrade-in-arms Miach had been looking for.

To me, Cian Reikado had been a friend.

A little girl, braver than any of us, and more of an adult than I would ever be.

</sentiment>

I wiped away a tear with the back of my hand and left the funeral home to go to the university where Keita Saeki worked. While Nuada Kirie, aka my father, had gone off to Baghdad, his partner had remained behind to continue his research here in Japan. He was still at the same school where he and my father had worked together on their medicule theories so many years before.

≡

I parked my car in the university lot and touched my hand to the screen of a FindYou on the way into the school (the granite base that the screen sat on gave it a nice academic look) and announced I was looking for Keita Saeki. The message searching appeared in the middle of the screen as the FindYou hunted for Keita’s WatchMe signal. After a moment, the lab and a map showing how to get there rose up on the screen. I touched the display to transfer the map to my own AR, and willfully ignoring the looks that my crimson Helix agent uniform got from the students, I followed the bobbing arrows that appeared in the air in front of me toward the laboratory.

Past a row of evergreens with pink leaves I found the building I was looking for. I pressed a finger to the door to identify myself and made for the laboratory.

“Come on in, I’ve been waiting for you,” came a familiar voice from inside. Of course, when I’d asked the FindYou to locate him, it let Keita Saeki know (as was his legal right) that I was looking for him. I strode through the door into the cluttered office.

“Wow, what a mess.”

The place was a mountain of printouts—manuscripts and research materials and the like. There were mounds of other dead media too. The thin black squares I recognized as floppy disks. “They’re like memorycels,” he had told me once when I had visited the laboratory as a child. As for the other things there, I had no idea what they might be called. Just looking at them, it was hard to even imagine what they might do.

“I’m surprised you can even walk around in here,” I said, making a show of hopping from bare spot to bare spot, going toward the professor like someone jumping from rock to rock across a river.

“I manage. Besides, ThingList remembers where I put everything if I ever need to find it,” the professor replied as he scratched his tangled monkey-puzzle-tree of a hairdo with one hand.

“It’s not a question of practicality. It’s a question of mental hygiene.”

“For scientists it’s always a question of need, Miss Kirie. As long as my ThingList has location tags, and it does, there’s no need for me to remember where anything is. I can just follow the arrows.”

“ThingList is a bad influence.”

“I like to think of it as outsourcing my memory to someone far more competent. I use a NeedList inside my ThingList so I don’t forget anything when I go out either.”

“Well, I spend a lot of time off-line, so that wouldn’t work for me.”

“Where’s that thesis?” Keita addressed the room. “The one that Czech mathematician wrote three years ago.” A long, pink, rubbery appendage extended from the intelligent material on the ceiling, moved about thirty feet across the room, then grew fingers to fish several sheets of a printout from a large stack, which it then brought to us. Everything in the room was tagged for identification and immediate retrieval—which meant that somewhere on the university server there was a perfect real-time replica of the professor’s office. No wonder the human race was growing soft.

I stood next to the professor and a gelatin seat materialized from the floor beneath me.

“Care for some water?”

“Got any caffeine?”

“Nah. The university—that is the student admedistration— won’t allow it. I’m surprised how well this generation looks after itself.”

“Wasn’t it your generation that wanted society to be this way?”

“Now now, how could anyone have predicted such an extremely health-conscious society would rise out of what we had before? Yo, two waters please.”

Once again the arm extended from the ceiling, pouring water into two cups and carrying them to us.

“There are many from our generation that can’t bear to fit into the molds society stamps for them,” I told him. “Plenty of people in your generation too, for that matter.”

“Give birth, consume. That’s the safe, stable cycle of life. Those who would attempt to destroy themselves, and thereby destroy that cycle, are anathema to the rest of us. Before they are allowed to do such a thing, it is our responsibility to notice the telltale signs and subject them to heavy therapy. That’s what being a thoughtful society means.”

“Don’t you think we’ve reached the limits of our over-considerate society by now?”

“What we’ve reached is a healthy, conflict-free status quo. Though the statistical rise in suicides within admedistrative society is troubling for sure, there are many who believe that pharmaceuticals and the development of novel therapeutic treatments, as well as the legal support for such treatments, will eventually bring the trend under control.”

“You seem well, professor.”

“Show me someone who doesn’t. With disease virtually abolished, it shouldn’t be hard. A lot of old expressions have lost their teeth that way, you know.”

Colds.

Migraines.

Infectious diseases.

I wondered how much pain I would have to feel before I could truly prove I existed. That I felt pain. That I was satisfied.

Cian had felt pain, and it terrified her.

She was frightened of being an undeniably living creature, with a nervous system and the whole works.

It went a little differently for the elderly. Life span was a hard out and an undeniable barrier. The older you got, the more you experienced that balance between life and death, and the more you began to fall apart, beyond the abilities of WatchMe and a medcare unit to catch up.

“Speaking of losing teeth, you can’t say that a feeble old man has no health problems,” I challenged him.

“True enough. There is no panacea for old age, I’ll give you that. But you have to agree those little buggers your dad and I cooked up are doing one hell of a job.”

“Well, for a world without disease, people sure do spend a lot of time gabbing about their health.”

The professor shrugged his shoulders as if to say it’s no fault of mine. He moved dexterously for a man in his mid-eighties.

“That’s because everyone’s still afraid that all it will take is one misstep and the cancers and viruses will be right back on us.”

“It’s already been half a century since the Maelstrom.”

“And the people who had to live through that—myself included—have control of the admedistrations. Plenty of councilors and commissioners are in their seventies and eighties. That chaos and the nuclear war that followed made our world a very harsh environment. The kind of place where you’d die without a space suit on. It was like living in a space station, one thin wall away from oblivion. The nuclear war and the radiation it spread made the perpetuation of our species a very dicey proposition, which it still would be without the help of homeostatic monitoring thanks to WatchMe and constant treatment by a medcare unit. You need strong armor to live in a harsh world.”

“So, even though the radiation’s gone, the fear remains?”

“Well, there’s a lot to be said for socialistic tendencies. Did you know that the first group to attempt the nationwide eradication of cancer and the prohibition of smoking were the Nazis?”

Fleeting memories of twentieth century history as taught in school.

With the Maelstrom waiting at the end of the semester, the sorry fate of the twentieth century Jews got sidelined in class. The longer history got, the more compressed its parts became.

“We’ll be lucky if we get one minute’s time,” Miach had said once. Leave it to Miach to imagine a history lesson one thousand years in the future. And who wouldn’t want to skip such an uneventful period in favor of something more exciting? As history marched on, our time would shrink, and shrink, and shrink away until finally there’d be nothing left.

The tragic genocide of the Jews was hanging on, tooth and nail, to its two minutes in class.

“They’re the lot who killed all those Jews, right?”

“You make them sound like rabble. They were a nation. Democratic in origin, with citizens, and voting, and a representative government. The Nazis took control over the details of daily life to a greater extent than anyone before them. They made a register of all cancer patients, listing all who had been affected, categorizing and analyzing them, all in the first organized attempt to eradicate cancer in history.”

“Fascism, was it? The political system in Germany under the Nazis, I mean.”

“Yes, and you can draw clear parallels between our admedistrative system and the health policies of the Nazis, if you like. Were you aware that pejorative words like fatty dropped from our language over the last half century?”

“Actually, I did know that one.” I chuckled. Miach Mihie, banzai!

“Under Nazi rule, the ‘crippled’ became the ‘physically impaired.’ Lunatic asylums became psychiatric hospitals. Countless words pertaining to the human body changed in subtle ways.”

“What’s lunatic mean?”

“Think of it as a not-very-nice way to refer to someone in serious need of high-level counseling and deep therapy. The Nazis also spearheaded the first nationwide attempt to stamp out smoking because of its detrimental effects on health. In 1939, the Nazi government established a regulatory agency for alcohol and tobacco products. In 1941, a research laboratory to study the harmful effects of tobacco was established at the Universität Wien under the auspices of Hitler himself.”

“You make it sound like the Nazis were a bunch of dogooders.”

With these cherry-picked examples, Nazi society didn’t sound all that different from ours. Which meant that now I had a personal reason to hate the Nazis as the forebears of the assholes who wouldn’t let me smoke today.

“In a sense, that’s true. Even if they were responsible for the greatest genocide of the twentieth century. There are many sides to everything, that’s the point. Take a clean freak and turn them up a few notches, whammo, they’re talking about racial purity.‘Tobacco is the source of all ills, a danger to the nation’s citizens.’That’s a protoform of what we call resource awareness today.”

I shrugged. “So we’ve just reinvented Nazi Germany on a global scale then. Great.”

“In a sense, yes, we have. Though there are significant differences. Foremost among them is that, in the time of the Nazis, it was the Nazi party and a few scientists who were pushing eugenics as a way to clean things up. In admedistrative society, everyone’s out there together, waving the same flag. We are all health freaks. The Nazis might have had the idea long before us, but not even they could keep their own soldiers on the front lines from smoking—especially in the harsher places like the Eastern Front.”

“Oh, I understand that. I really understand that.” I chuckled. Of course, for me it worked the other way around. It wasn’t battlefield conditions that made me smoke. It was the smokes that lured me out to the battlefield. I wondered for the first time what had become of Étienne and the others who used to partake in our contraband exchanges. For a moment, I was transported back to the sunflower fields and blue skies of the Sahara, dotted with the indigo veils of the Kel Tamasheq.

“But now tobacco’s gone from the world. Save for a few holdouts in Africa and parts of Asia—conflict zones, mostly. Go to any admedistration and you’ll not find a single constituent partaking of either cigarettes or alcohol. The same goes without saying for harder drugs. Do you know why drugs were prohibited in the first place, way back when?”

“Enlighten me.”

“It started back during the settlement of North America. The slaves and laborers brought in from Africa and China had a custom of chewing on coca leaves, which enabled them to work far beyond the usual limits of their physical bodies. Of course, this didn’t amuse the white laborers who weren’t partaking. By abolishing drugs for moral reasons, they attempted to wrest the title of top laborers from so-called inferior races.”

“That’s funny. I always thought it was because drugs ruined people’s lives.”

“Well, that’s true too, but that’s only one aspect of the truth.” The professor leaned back in his chair. “Of course, my generation is blessed and cursed with having seen the reasons why our current health-obsessed society needs to be what it is. And I’m sure you had to sit through your share of lessons on the Maelstrom when you were in school, Tuan.”

The section of history class dealing with the Maelstrom was a curriculum heavyweight. Thinking back on it, it occurred to me that history had always been Miach’s favorite subject—the only one she was truly passionate about—and the Maelstrom was her favorite part of that.

I had never been much interested in history class, even though we were always happy to receive Miach’s gleanings of wisdom from the same.

Hey, Tuan, you know what?

A whole ten million people died during just a few years in North America… “

That’s mostly because the people writing your textbooks were just the right age to remember the Maelstrom with fear,”Professor Saeki went on. “There were riots all over America—the strongest and wealthiest nation in the world at the time—that touched every corner of the land. A lot of racial cleansing too. Hispanics, Koreans, Africans—everyone was a target. The killing was so frenzied you would think everyone in the country had been born with an organ specifically designed for massacring people who didn’t look like them. So ethnicity killed ethnicity, and the chaos spread to other countries, until the terrorists decided to start lobbing the nukes they’d stolen, and everything went to hell. Our current benevolent society is a reaction to that. Some people might find the air a bit stifling, but it’s a sight better than falling into chaos like the Maelstrom again. After all, no one wants to see themselves and their children die, and what we have now is far preferable to the past, when a few men in smoke-filled rooms had all the power.”

“I’m glad we’ve learned how to tame each other, then. It’s like we’re all one another’s pets, isn’t it.”

“Always a cynic. Look, when people experience something really extreme, it’s very difficult for them to find balance after that. Their reaction usually points in an equally extreme opposite direction. That’s how we got our lifeist society. I agree, we’ve gone overboard for sure. It’s a bit silly to keep a piggy bank around when your wallet’s always full—but you wouldn’t know what a piggy bank is, would you, Tuan?”

I tried to keep from laughing out loud and only mostly succeeded.

The professor raised an eyebrow at me. “Something funny?”

“No, I was just remembering having heard a friend use that expression a long time ago.”

“You don’t say.” The professor shrugged. “Whatever, I’m sure you didn’t come here to learn about antiquated idiomatic expressions. What do you want to know, Tuan? When a WHO agent comes calling, it’s usually something important.”

“Miach Mihie.”

It was quick, but I didn’t miss the look of alarm that passed across Professor Saeki’s eyes. He put one hand to his mouth and looked thoughtful. “Hmm, yes. I received her body on Nuada’s behalf.”

“Where is my father?”

“A good question. Neither of us have tried contacting each other for quite some time.”

I decided I would press the attack. “My father took Miach along with him to Baghdad, didn’t he?”

The professor waved his hand as if to suggest this was not a fruitful line of questioning. The old man’s guard was up, I could tell.

“Where is my father? Is he not in Baghdad?”

The professor shook his head and sighed. “If he’s not in Baghdad, then your guess is as good as mine. Why not ask the global FindYou?”

“I did. Apparently, he’s no longer on the planet.”

He cocked his head. “What do you suppose that means?”

“I didn’t get a single hit from a search. Nor is he on any of the death records of any admedistration. He might’ve turned off the location signal on his WatchMe, but even then I’d still get a hit—I just wouldn’t know where he was.”

I stared at the professor, wondering how many of his defenses I would have to patiently dismantle, how many moats I would have to fill to get to the truth. No wonder Miach’s mother gave me his contact information, for all the good it was doing me.

Professor Saeki scratched his head and chewed his lip. “That’s perplexing. Mind telling me why the sudden interest in finding your father?”

“Actually, I’m not that interested in my father. What I want to know is what happened to Miach. You’re aware of the mass suicide the other day?”

“Over six thousand people across the planet killed themselves at exactly the same time. Show me someone who doesn’t know about it.”

“Well, I think Miach Mihie was involved, and before you remind me, yes, I know she’s been dead for thirteen years.”

Keita Saeki was silent. A hard look came into his eyes. “If that’s what you want to know about, you should talk to the woman who was working as Nuada’s assistant in Baghdad. Name of Gabrielle Étaín. She’s in the Baghdad labs of the SEC neuromedical consortium. Nuada and Gabrielle worked there together.”

“What were they working on?”

“Do you really need to know?” he asked. I could see his mind racing behind his eyes.

“I’ll be the judge of that. If I have to, I can get a warrant from the Japanese police.”

The professor stared at me, his mouth hanging slightly open. This wasn’t my first time at the negotiation table, and I wasn’t going to let some eccentric scholar locked up in his ivory tower talk me out of getting the information I wanted.

“It seems as though Nuada’s daughter has only grown wilder with age.”

“It’s an occupational disease. There are worse symptoms, if you care to see them.”

“That’s quite all right. I frighten easily enough,” the professor said. He called up a command pad on his desktop screen and began downloading data from someplace. He indicated the desk, so I reached out and touched it to do the transfer.

A densely packed scientific paper began scrolling at high speed through my AR.

“I don’t have time to read all this and you know it.”

“Call it my little way of getting back at you.”

“Um, excuse me?”

“I’m kidding, mostly. Let me sum it up for you. The paper is concerned with human will. A certain Russian researcher was able to use a psychological simulation based on these data to create a fairly detailed model of how the human will works.”

The professor pulled up a 3-D image embedded in the paper. It was a small picture of the brain that now began to rotate in my AR. A narrow wedge of it was blinking.

I pointed. “What’s that?”

“Part of the mesencephalon, the midbrain,” he said. “This is the part that governs the feedback system in our brains. Put simply, it processes the signals that motivate us to do things. Every action, no matter how small, has its associated reward. In most cases it’s a simple sensation of pleasure or fulfillment. If I have sex I will feel good—that’s a very simple, extreme example. Actually, my explanation is slightly off, but all you need to know is the general concept here. What I’m talking about is the range of feedback, great and infinitesimally small, that inspires us to repeat certain choices. This reward system creates a vast variety of motivating desire modules that compete for our attention. We call the act of choosing between these modules our will.”

The professor looked at me as if to ask whether I understood. I motioned for him to continue.

“Picture, say, a conference room. Real or in an AR session, it doesn’t matter. There’re all these people there and they’re all clamoring for this or that, until they boil things down to a collection of salient points and come to a conclusion. Think of the desire modules we all carry around as the people in that meeting, trying to get their opinions heard. When we think of human will, it’s common sense to think of it as a single existence or an all-discerning soul. But it’s not. It’s the heated debate, the shouting and the name-calling. It’s the process itself. The will isn’t one thing, it’s all of your desires clamoring for attention—that very state of being. Humans forget that we are a collection of disparate fragments and go around calling ourselves ‘I’ as though we were one immutable entity. It’s comical, really.”

“And this paper models that system?”

The professor dropped his display and leaned forward on his desk, nodding. “It does. When Nuada read this, he realized that if you could influence the various elements in a person’s feedback system, you could influence their will. Even control it.”

Controlling a person’s will?

I appreciated the professor’s finesse in saying something of such dire import with all the nonchalance of someone discussing the weather.

“Desire is very closely linked to reward. If the reward associated with a particular desire is slight, it reduces our will to act on that desire, and it becomes very hard for that particular desire to take the floor in that meeting of modules I talked about. People change their minds all the time. It’s the differences in reward levels that change our will, and it’s all mapped out. We even know how the feedback system interacts with different parts of the brain. The only problem was creating the medicules that could act on this knowledge. There needed to be a way to get the troops into the battlefield, which is the midbrain in this case.”

A light went on in my head. “Past the blood-brain barrier.”

“There is that, yes. But that’s only one of the problems involved. In any case, that’s what Nuada went to Baghdad to study.”

Controlling people’s desires.

Controlling people’s wills.

If you could sweep up all the fragments that made up our souls and lock them together like pieces of a puzzle, could you make a perfect person? What kind of person would that be?

Not someone like Miach. Not someone like me.

Miach had implored us to show our lack of value to the world. The day they figured out how to completely control a person’s will, the point would be moot.

I pictured a world of people all living together in perfect harmony.

A perfect society, run by perfect people, perfectly.

Our collective medical society was a good start in that direction. All it lacked was the tool sufficient to finish the job. My father had left myself and my mother and Japan to go to Baghdad to find that tool. To fashion a scalpel sharp enough to cut souls.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Tuan, but the prospect of being able to fiddle with a person’s soul makes for a very attractive research project.”

The professor scratched his head, averting his eyes from me, as though he felt he shared a bit of my father’s guilt. His gaze drifted to the row of pink-leaved trees outside the window. “You can’t wave a good idea like this in front of a scientist and expect them not to reach for it. I’m not condoning what he did to you and your mother, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand what it’s like to be a scientist in his position—and why he left you to go to Baghdad.”

“I understand what you’re saying, professor. But you’re not my father. His sin is his and no one else’s.”

I looked away, my eyes wandering until they found a yellow square among the floppy disks scattered across the floor. There was a label on the front of it with some kind of logo and an illustration like one from a children’s book. Probably some kind of game in its day.

“Someday, that will be us lying there,” the professor said quietly. I looked up, not understanding.

“Dead media. Relics of a bygone age.” He leaned back in his chair. “You’ve read those science fiction stories where humans manage to digitize the consciousness and upload themselves to some computer network. We do that, and our bodies will be nothing but antiquated dead media as far as our souls are concerned. It’s not hard to imagine a few soulless bodies lying around between the piles of magnetic tape and flash memory cards in my office once we evolve our consciousness beyond the need for the flesh.”

“Really?” I asked. “I always thought it was the other way around. That the soul was just a function of the body—a means to keep it alive. Once our bodies find something more suitable to propagate themselves and are able to trade in these old souls, then it’s we who become the dead media.”

That caught him off his guard. The professor sat with a blank expression on his face for a few moments. Then he laughed out loud. “True enough! A very radical idea at first blush, but from the perspective of evolution, I’d say yours is more correct. Perhaps it is I who was caught up in an antiquated notion of the human soul as something sacred and unique.”

“The question is, if someone developed the technology to control and change human will, what would they do with it?”

“Tuan.” The professor shook his head. “I think, and this is just my opinion, but I think that most scientists don’t do research like that with any kind of objective. They aren’t thinking what they want to do with it. The research itself is the goal. It’s a challenge. Like the mountain climber says, they do it because it’s there. If there is an issue of scientific interest, they’ll look into it. That’s all the motivation they need.”

I stood and strode toward the door, not even bothering to pick my way through the piles of printouts that scattered in my wake. I stopped just before I reached the door and said over my shoulder, “Professor, I’m looking for Miach Mihie. Finding my father is just a means to that end.”

I left the lab behind me, feeling like I was getting closer to the truth than I had ever been. I could feel it in my bones. I was on the right path.

<list:item>

<i: Miach Mihie>
<i: my dad>
<i: consciousness manipulation>

</list>

I didn’t need bobbing AR arrows to find my way on this one.

≡

Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg was not pleased with my failure to report my findings either to the Japanese police or to my own Helix Inspection Agency branch. She was on my HeadPhone right now, criticizing me in sentences carefully worded to avoid any offensive language.

“Don’t worry, I’m making progress,” was all I could tell her, which she followed by asking for more details. Her persistence made me feel like I had somehow unconsciously uttered the shocking words It’s private and now she had it in for me. Of course, that was just my imagination working overtime. Os Cara had no idea of my growing personal involvement in the investigation.

I walked, letting my eyes wander along the ground, grunting noncommittal replies to her questions as I made my way down the white walkway that led past the pink trees on the way to the university parking lot.

“I’m going to Baghdad.”

“What?!”

Though her voice was as smooth as ever, it was clear she was fuming just beneath the surface. Still, she managed an almost civil “Why Baghdad?” to which I replied, “Because that’s where my investigation is leading me. Neither of us has a whole lot of options when it comes to what we can say, do we?” I added. That really rubbed her the wrong way.

“Don’t think you can keep playing the Niger card over and over again.”

“Oh,” I said, “I intend to use that one till it’s worn around the edges.” I stared at the alias graphic my AR displayed in place of Os Cara’s real face. It amused me that our aliases looked so calm while we were down in the trenches, lobbing verbal grenades at each other.

Most people had the habit of looking down at their feet while they were on their HeadPhone—probably because otherwise they would get too caught up in the conversation and trip on something. It was such a common sight these days that hardly anyone paid it a second thought, but if someone from a hundred years ago slipped into our time, they would see a bunch of people walking around staring down at the ground muttering to themselves and rightly determine we were all in need of therapy.

I’m sorry, Miach.

Those words tickled the back of my mind. Something about the way Cian had been staring down at her caprese. In all the other AR archive footage of the suicides I’d seen, the act had progressed smoothly from what came before. People were just doing whatever they normally did, then they were finding a way to kill themselves.

Cian was the only one who had taken any time before the act, her head bowed, as though she were reflecting on what she was about to do.

She had been the only one to look down, just as I was looking down right now while I talked to Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg. Just Cian Reikado. Just her.

“Prime, we’re going to have to continue this from the PassengerBird. Something really important’s just come up.”

I cut the call before Prime had time to really lose her shit, and drawing on the access to local police records we Helix agents had been given as part of this investigation, I called up Cian Reikado’s phone records.

The day of Cian’s death. 13:16.

Just before she died.

As she looked down at her plate.

<fear>

My spine froze. That day, as Cian sat across from me staring at her caprese, she had been on the phone with someone else.

I didn’t have to think too hard to figure out who it was.Cian had said her name, after all.

It was just hard to accept.

It was terrifying to accept.

A dead person—or at least, someone I had believed to be dead—calling my friend just before her own death. The record of that call from 13:16 two days ago blinked in the corner of my AR, quietly yet steadily demanding that I play back this message from beyond the grave.

</fear>

With trembling fingers, I reached out and pressed the blinking entry on the list.

A voice recording opened.

</silence>

<log:phonelink:id=4ids8094bnuj8hjndf6>

Hello, Cian.

Long time no see. Thirteen years, huh?

I’m calling because I wanted to talk to you about what it means to be “good.”

I’m talking Good with a capital G.

What do you think it means?

It’s not about helping people in need or making friends or not hurting others. Those are aspects of being good, but they’re really just details. If you get right down to it, Good is the will it takes to maintain a certain set of values over time.

That’s right, maintenance. Maintaining a family, maintaining happiness, maintaining peace. It doesn’t really matter what you’re maintaining. All you have to do is keep something going that people believe in. That’s the essence of Good.

But nothing goes on forever, does it?

That’s why you have to make a constant, conscious effort to be good. You have to keep those branches spreading toward the sun. Good has to be actively maintained. Put it another way, that which you consciously believe in and maintain is Good.Even though that could be all kinds of things.

Too bad our bodies aren’t built for the task. People grow, then grow old. People get sick. People die. There’s no good or bad in nature because everything always changes. Everything goes away in the end. That’s what’s kept Good from swallowing up the world so far. That’s what’s kept people from growing arrogant with all the Good they’ve done, though only just barely. But now, thanks to WatchMe and medicules, disease and even regular aging are in the process of being eliminated.The value we call health is trampling over everything else.What do you think that means? It means that the flood is coming. We’re about to drown.

If it isn’t all Good now, it soon will be.

</log>

It was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Miach Mihie’s voice. It was also, beyond question, her thinking.

<log:phonelink:id=4ids8094bnuj8hjndf6:playtime:2 m52s06ms>

There’ve never been so many people governed by Good.

There’ve never been so many people giving themselves up to Good.

There have been many versions of Good throughout the ages.

When the Bastille fell in France, when the sons of freedom threw crates of tea into the harbor in Boston—every age has had its heroes who try to do Good. That was the whole idea behind America, with its freedom and democracy for all.

But never has Good held so many people’s lives in thrall at any one time.

Back when kings ruled, the king would threaten to sentence anyone who turned against him to death, so people listened.They made people obey through violence. That’s why the French Revolution was a success. All they had to do was take out the king. Once you have enough people come out and claim a mandate, saying “This is the people’s will,” all you needed next was violence to finish the job. But with the birth of democracy, rule ceased to come from the top. Now it came from the people. Eventually it got to the point we’re at now, where everybody governs themselves.

What do we do if the enemy we’re fighting against is inside each of us?

Our lifeism is the ultimate expression of rule by all, and its final destination.

Ever hear of The Three Musketeers? It’s a story—a novel written by Alexandre Dumas—about these three soldiers living in seventeenth century France. In it, there’s a saying: “One for all, and all for one.”

That worked fine for them, seeing as how they were only saying it to a couple other people.

In the world of resource awareness, we’re making that same oath, except we’re swearing it to everyone in our admedistration—no, everyone in the world—and we are expected to surrender our lives to ensure we follow through.

You were supposed to come with me, Cian. You and Tuan.

But you didn’t.

You said you would fight with me. That we’d fight together.

You hurt me. You made me very sad.

But I think if you can show me your courage now, that will be enough. Show the world there’s nothing permanent. Show the world your body belongs to you alone. Show everyone right now, and it will be just like it was back in the day.

Back when we were us.

Please, Cian. I need you to be brave.

Show it to me. Show it to the world.

</log>

My mouth moved, forming Cian’s final words along with her.

I’m sorry, Miach.

</body>
</etml>