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

Harmony — LNCrawler · All chapters

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

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The three of us were sitting on a rooftop, each with our own lunch. The contents of mine and Cian’s had both been decided by our mothers based on a range of choices provided them by a lifestyle pattern designer to ensure a perfect balance of nutritional control and modest tastes—so as not to overexcite our youthful minds with shameful flavors.

All our mothers had to do was make the food.

The flavors we needed were determined by a specially trained lifestyle pattern designer who could read our bodies’ preferences and predilections. The designer then ordered all the necessary ingredients online, coordinating with our household management software to make sure our diets stayed within budget.

The various facets of our lives were being divided into smaller and smaller sections. Outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing. When I was very small, I had the feeling that things weren’t quite so scattered. I was pretty sure I remembered my mom fretting about my age and height and weight and body fat percentage when I was around five years old. She would read charts, size me up, and come up with her own lunch recipes.

Miach’s lunch was nothing like ours. The recipes were incredibly simple, and more than two-thirds of her rather large lunch box would be filled with white rice and a big reddish-black lump in the middle of it that I think was probably an umeboshi pickled plum.

“Naoya Shiga used to say that the Japanese lost the war because they ate white rice,” Miach said, her cheeks full of white rice laced with sesame salt. A single grain of rice was stuck to her cheek.

“What war?”

“The Second World War. It was a fight between the two nations of America and Japan.”

“But didn’t both of them get divided up by the admedistrations?”

“Right, but this was back when America was still a country. Before the Maelstrom.”

“Um, Miach, that’s great, but you have rice on your face,” Cian broke in, giggling.

“Oh.” Miach found it with her index finger and plucked it off.

“Why do you eat so much all the time, Miach?”

“Because I like to eat. And if I don’t eat this much, my head doesn’t work right.”

I looked between my lunch and Miach’s. “You don’t have many things besides rice in there. It’s mostly all rice. And your lunch box is huge too.”

“Yet I’m skinny. Funny, isn’t it? The brown adipose tissue on my back did a number on my metabolism. I burn everything and none of the food gets to my brain. That’s why I have to shove so much of it in. If there was a speed-eating contest, I bet I’d win it.”

“What’s that?”

“These contests where people would try to see who could eat the most the fastest. The media channels used to show things like that, before the Maelstrom. It’s all shockingly unhealthy. The kind of thing those people in morality sessions love to bad-mouth.”

It sounded pretty horrible. I didn’t see how there could be any pleasure in damaging your stomach and intestines by eating so much. I sat down on the rooftop, looking down on city streets devoid of any shapes or colors that might prove too stimulating. “So, what do you tell your mom or dad what you want to eat for lunch?”

“I don’t. That is, I make my lunch myself. Of course my mom wants me to use this nosy lifestyle pattern designer or something. No thanks.”

“Doesn’t it reflect poorly on your mom’s SA score if her daughter doesn’t take her health advice?”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. I’m never really sure about those things. You know the old saying, ‘Kids grow up despite their parents.’”

“Yeah, but isn’t it a little different? I thought it went: ‘Even without parents, children will flourish.’”

“Yes, that’s the original. But there was this writer named Ango Sakaguchi, and he said that children would flourish without the useless baggage that is their parents. That’s a lot different than saying a kid’s going to grow up even without the benefit of parents. Of course, a lot of people have different ideas as to what constitutes flourishing.”

“Sakaguchi, huh? Sounds interesting.”

“You can download it from the Borgesnet. I recommend actually reading it—you know, with your eyes—instead of using the reader.”

So saying, Miach picked up a large lump of rice sprinkled with sesame salt and crammed it into her mouth. The sight of her chewing with both cheeks full was so comical I had to laugh.

“What?”

“Do you really have to cram it all in at once like that?”

“I’m just trying to match you guys. You have so much less that if I don’t eat quick, I’ll never keep up.”

“Don’t worry about keeping up with me,” Cian said. “I always leave some anyway.” She closed her lunch box with an audible snap. “My parents want me to eat it, but it’s way too much for the middle of the day.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t really get hungry until two or three o’clock. At noon I still feel full from breakfast.”

“Do you know why we eat lunch at noon?” Miach asked through a full mouth.

I shrugged. “Is it because we’re hungry?”

“Apparently Cian isn’t.”

I looked in Cian’s direction, then lowered my head. “Oh, right. Sorry.”

“That’s okay, you don’t have to apologize.”

“Neither of you do,” Miach joined in. “People get hungry whenever they feel like it, that’s natural. It’s that the school system doesn’t approve of natural human flexibility.”

“Well, if you’re going to have a group of people eating, it makes sense to eat together.”

“Why can’t we eat during class is what I want to know.”

Now that she mentioned it, it did seem curious that people often read or watched media channels while they were eating, but we weren’t supposed to eat while we read our textbooks in school. Maybe it was because it would distract us from class? But that didn’t make sense either. Class and lunch were equally boring. At least, my mother’s lunches never tasted good enough to distract me from anything.

“It’s a rule. These rules are meant to divide up our time, partition it, control it. Strictly speaking, by getting hungry around two or three o’clock, Cian’s digestive system is going against the rules—and Cian blames her own body for not being able to get with the program. She blames herself. How silly is that?”

Miach was in the zone now. Miach, our ideologue. She gathered up another ball of rice with her chopsticks, still talking. “The time divisions at school have been the same for a long while. What started as the idea that it was fun for everyone to eat together, or that it made more sense for work, eventually became proscribed in more detail, with start times and end times. It became a rule. You know there was no such thing as lifestyle pattern designers before lifeism took off? But once something like that becomes popular, it becomes the thing to do, then it becomes a rule, then it becomes law. Just another of the invisible things out there trying to control our bodies.”

Miach kept talking at full speed, her cheeks full of a lot of rice and a little bit of toppings. Finally she tossed back the last bit of rice, packed up her lunch box, and put it back in her bag. Then she stood and walked over to the railing that ran around the rooftop and spoke out loud, like she was making a proclamation to the scenery—or even to the entire world.

“‘It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most “private.”’”

“Who said that?”

“Michel Foucault.”

Even though her lunch was much bigger than ours, Miach had finished way before we were done. I ate up the last of mine, wrapped my lunch box in a cloth, and tucked it away inside my bag. A quiet breeze blew, brushing past our foreheads and through our hair.

Death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it.

“So is that the only way out?” I asked quietly.

Miach was looking out over the city, confronting it. “I used to be in another place, under the dominion of another power. It was hell,” she said without turning around. “That’s why I escaped, to come here. But here’s crazy too. This is no place for people to live.”

“What was it like, the other place?”

“The exact opposite of here. Over there guns kill people.

Here, kindness kills them. It’s all the same.”

</recollection>

So here I was, thirteen years later, in that other place Miach had told us about.

Already, several small-scale disturbances had broken out across the globe. The police forces, accustomed to the peaceful routine of everyday life, were immediately overloaded, and many cities and admedistrations had gone weeping to those few remaining countries with standing militaries to beg for assistance.

<movie:ar:id=6aehko908724h3008k>

<fear>

Franz Recht picked up the knife his wife always used and looked at it.

It was the knife she used to cut cabbage for her sauerkraut.

The knife she used to slice blutwurst.

Franz Recht had never been very good at cooking. He had left all that to her. He would clean up around the house and go shopping, but he had never cooked a single meal. It had been a long time since he had even set foot in the kitchen.

Once he had stepped in though, his eyes had started to swim. Perhaps he was dazed by the sheer variety of potentially lethal items he found there. Practically any of them would suit his current purpose. Which made sense, when he thought about it. This was a place for ending and processing life.

Cutting, carving, beating, burning, stewing, steaming.

Many religions have rules about food.

<item>Kosher</item>

Dietary restrictions followed by those of the Jewish faith. As blood is life, goes one teaching, the blood must be removed from food in the proper manner. A strict observer’s kitchen will have two sinks. One to drain the blood and purify the food, the other for typical kitchen use. Pork, considered to never be clean, is prohibited.

</definition>

<item>Halal<item>

Tenets of Islam, especially those pertaining to food. Halal literally means “that which is permitted by Allah.” All meat must be slaughtered according to the method called dhabiha if it is to be halal. Dhabiha requires that you use a sharp knife to cut the windpipe, esophagus, and carotid artery swiftly, so as to cause the animal as little pain as possible, while leaving the spinal cord intact. The preparer then says “Bismillah Allahu akbar” to ask for Allah’s blessing, and only then is the meat considered to be halal.

</definition>
</dictionary>

This was the way food used to be. Only consumed after all the necessary, annoying protocol had been followed. That was how killing was too.

“Honey!”

A call from the door. Franz’s wife was home. His eyes went to the entranceway. Franz went down the hall to greet his wife just inside the door, where he plunged the carving knife he had just picked up in the kitchen into her chest.

Being a rather moderate Christian, Franz had no need for halal or dhabiha. He certainly wasn’t going to say Allahu akbar. He just had to thrust out with his arm to bury the knife—the one she used to cut the cabbage for her sauerkraut—into her rib cage.

Her eyes met his in surprise.

Perhaps he was frightened, or perhaps—being an amateur at this—he wasn’t sure how much force was necessary to actually kill, or whether he had managed to hit a vital organ. So to be safe, Franz knelt over his fallen wife and stabbed her again and again. He stabbed her in the chest and the stomach and everywhere except her head, that head with the beautiful face. He kept stabbing for several minutes until her body was in ribbons.

</fear>

Then Franz put a hand to one ear and called the police, while he was still straddling his wife’s corpse. Yes, I just killed my wife. Yes. You know, what they were saying, how we had to kill someone or we would die? I figured there’s no death penalty in this country. And I don’t mean to be demanding, but could you please send a patrol car to pick me up? What?They’re all out? I see, well I suppose everyone is busy these days. Busy like me.

Franz hung up the phone and stared at the body beneath him for a few moments before he began to weep.

</movie>

“And that’s just one example,” Stauffenberg was saying. Everyone participating in the AR session was standing, stunned, wherever they happened to be in the real world.

“It appears the declaration started to take hold in earnest yesterday. We’ve had other killings and many suicides as well. Even with the gag order on the media, everyone seems to be getting the same idea.”

Someone asked what the admedistrations were doing.

Stauffenberg shook her head. “Those admedistrations with enough wherewithal to hire civilian police forces have sent them all out already. In addition, at the general assembly of the admedistrations, they made a request for national police forces and armies and, if possible, Geneva Convention forces to be placed in every city, but it’s already getting difficult to find available troops, and many places are already too destabilized to help. Riots and lawlessness are spreading. It is, in fact, looking like the second coming of the Maelstrom, at least to hear the older folks tell it. No place is safe. Kill another, kill yourself, or be killed. It’s the perfect recipe for chaos.”

Different images flickered on the virtual screen. A pile of bloody corpses, thirty high, resting on a cobblestone street in some typical European village. Medical troops wearing pink gas masks were adding bodies to the pile, trying to clear a path for vehicles to pass. Another clip showed men and women breaking through barricades, wielding sticks and pipes against the army; the troops turned to using nonlethal microwaves to keep them back. The rioters would just run off in some other direction. No matter what the soldiers did, it was ineffective.

“The day after tomorrow is the deadline, so to speak. Fear has swallowed many already, and it will get worse.”

A satellite image showed a group of half-dressed men in a circle around two combatants wielding knives, caught by the satellite’s cold gaze. The men around were urging on the two in the middle. Once each of them had killed one other person, the group would disperse. If men had the rational capacity to make rules for killing like this, how could they lack the rational ability to choose not to believe the declaration and let the deadline come? Our hyperbolic valuing system overestimated the clear and present fear, driving us to illogical action.

We were breaking open the piggy bank with money still in our wallets.

“There are, at present, no reports of any murders within our police or military forces. However, I would not be much surprised if those reports came—merely disheartened.”

“Even if the killer was a Helix agent?” I asked with dark sarcasm in my voice.

Prime’s lips thinned, and a twisted smile came to her face. “Yes, even then. I fully intend to stay at my post until the moment of reckoning, as I believe all of you will choose to do, but with such chaos before us, I can understand if you are finding your resolve tested. Not that I’m worried about you, Agent Kirie. You’ve already killed someone, haven’t you.”

“In self-defense.”

“Lucky for you. Must be nice to kill without feeling guilt.”

“Shouldn’t we be talking about the investigation?” I asked, countering Stauffenberg’s sarcasm with duty. Prime nodded quietly and motioned for me to continue.

“This gets a little complicated, but bear with me. The man I killed was a member of Interpol, yet he was using his authority as such for the benefit of a secret society to which he belonged. His name was Elijah Vashlov. I have confirmed that he was on staff at Interpol HQ as an intelligence regulator. Intel regulators are responsible for sifting through the fractured intelligence relating to crimes that cross between the jurisdiction of multiple governments and/or admedistrations, and help negotiate information-sharing protocols.”

“Which is why he showed up both in Japan and in Baghdad.”

“That’s right. The secret society for which he worked is called the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group. This group was launched soon after the Maelstrom ended and consists of top people in the admedistrations, medical industrial collectives, the upper echelon of WHO, and a handful of independent scientists. I was unable to obtain more information than this from Vashlov. According to the information I did obtain, this group’s primary objective is to prevent global chaos like the Maelstrom from ever happening again. Toward this end, they had enlisted the help of neuromedical researchers.”

“Can you explain this research?”

“They’re looking into the connection between human will and human action. I’m no expert on the subject, so that’s about as far as I got.”

“And then you killed the man who gave you this information?”

“My father was also killed. By Vashlov,” I replied, straining to keep my anger in check.

“That’s right. I hear he took a bullet for you. Can you explain why you went to meet with your father?”

“Because I had heard he was part of the Next-Gen group. My father is a famous scientist, the one who first postulated the basic theory that made WatchMe and medcare a possibility. It seemed not at all unlikely that such a group would call for his services.”

“Yet that doesn’t make sense. If everything you have told us is true, that would mean that this Vashlov fellow killed your father even though they were part of the same group.”

I thought for a moment. Two people were dead. One of them by my hand. There was only so far I could take this without revealing something. I needed to figure out how few of my cards I could show and how far I could get away with some harmless lies in order for Stauffenberg to be satisfied.

“Within this group, there are two factions, each with different ideologies. Vashlov identified himself as a heretic within the group. I can only speculate that he was referring to this internal conflict.”

“And now that your father and this Vashlov are both dead, there is nothing remaining to prove the existence of this conspiracy.”

No, that wasn’t true. Vashlov had told me that the SEC Neuromedical Research Consortium was merely a public front for the Next-Gen group.

“There is one other known collaborator by the name of Gabrielle Étaín.”

“Who is dead. Murdered. Three hours ago.”

“What?” I gasped.

Stauffenberg was staring me down. “It was a random killing, as random as any of the killings in the world have been these last few days. It happened in broad daylight, in a corridor of the Dian Cécht complex in Baghdad. With all the scientists, who tend to be more levelheaded than the average mob, there have been fewer killings and group suicides in Baghdad—but there have been some exceptions. Within Dian Cécht alone, there have already been fourteen untimely deaths, both murders and suicides in just the last two days. Already, the casework is far beyond what security and the Baghdad police can handle.”

“We could investigate the SEC?”

“We will. Though with such a vital source as Gabrielle gone, I have my doubts as to how far such an investigation would take us—where are you now, by the way?”

“In a PassengerBird. Upper deck.”

“To where?”

“Chechnya.”

“Why Chechnya? Another loose thread?”

“I can’t say.”

This was it. I could show no more of my hand. What I needed was a convenient lie.

“Vashlov told me that there were members of his group within the Helix Inspection Agency. I don’t know which superiors you report to, ma’am, but I think that the chances of them being sympathizers are high.”

This was my big bluff. Vashlov had said nothing of the sort. Although now that I thought about it, it did seem like an idea with some merit.

“Given a choice, I’d prefer not to telegraph our every move to our opponent.”

“You mean your every move. With Cian Reikado’s death, and now your father’s, this case has become quite personal for you, hasn’t it. It doesn’t bode well, Inspector Kirie.”

“And yet, I have made more progress than any other agent.”

Stauffenberg stared me in the eye. I couldn’t read anything in her expression. Maybe she was trying to read me. Or maybe she was just trying to accept reality. After five seconds of silence, Prime asked for everyone else to leave the session. One by one, the other Helix agents logged off, scratching their heads as they went. I was alone with Stauffenberg. She took a deep breath and said, “All right. I’ll be honest. It’s me.”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

“I’m an upper-rank member in the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group.”

I laughed out loud, both at my bluff having hit the mark so well, and at the ridiculousness of my current situation.

“So you were following me the whole time?”

“Yes. Both sides of our group have been watching you. We had given you mostly free reign in hopes that you would contact Miach Mihie’s group or they you in the course of your investigation.”

“So it wasn’t the Tuareg card after all.”

“You were allowed to continue operating for the sole purpose of tracking down Miach Mihie’s whereabouts. You’re not the first Helix agent to disgrace herself in the field, and your past behavior certainly wouldn’t have bought you any of your current relative freedom.”

So the Next-Gen group wanted Miach, and Miach’s sect wanted Nuada, and both sides had been using me to get what they wanted.

“Both of you needed to track down the leader of the other group, which made me very valuable as the daughter of one and the friend of the other.”

“It just happens that you and we are after the same person. We were cooperating—as unintentional as it may have been.”

“It certainly does seem that way.”

“I’m sorry about your father, truly.”

Judging from the look on Stauffenberg’s face, she was telling the truth. It wasn’t hard to picture my father as a respected leader of his group. There was an ironic gap between that and my memory of him getting chewed out by that woman in the morality session all those years ago.

“Miach Mihie still possesses a limited ability to control feedback mechanisms within the brains of the constituencies of several admedistrations. She’s gone into hiding. What they have been doing is manipulating the feedback mechanism within the midbrain to instill a desire for death, causing people to kill themselves. We wanted to use you to get into contact with her so we could find out what her goals were in causing this current chaos, and attempt to stop her. You see, we have absolutely no idea what she’s up to.”

Had it only been me and Cian, and probably my father, who knew about Miach’s dark past? All those curses we dreamed up to cast on the world, huddled together at our desks on those dreary school days. Wasn’t Miach still carrying the hatred she had held in her heart back then? Wasn’t she just using her newfound power to put her fantasies into action—her power to make mincemeat of the society she so despised?

If that was true, then the current situation was an extremely private one for us, and now that Cian and my father were gone, I was the only one capable of understanding it.

There was a point to slowly releasing the shackles of our social system as she was doing, to using an abject fear of others to undo the little fetters around each of us one at a time—and I was the only one who got it.

A world where your body was your own. That was what the Miach I had known as a child wanted. A body that was hers, not beholden to a society or its rules.

“So, what can we do about this?” Prime asked.

“Who’s the agent in charge of monitoring life-issues between Chechnya and Russia?”

“That’s…Inspector Uwe Vol.”

“Then can you direct him to aid my investigation once I arrive?”

“Very well.” Stauffenberg went to cut our connection, then her hand stopped. “The fate of the world is resting on your shoulders, Inspector Kirie. Good luck.”

Words of personal encouragement were about the last thing I had expected from my typically venomous boss. This whole thing had started as a personal matter, and if anything, it had only gotten more personal as I went. Frankly, even with all the riots and mass suicide going on, I hadn’t been worried about the world at all. All I wanted to do was find Miach Mihie—who had killed Cian, and probably my father as well—and somehow get some closure from her. That was the only thing keeping me moving, the only thing I really felt.

I went off-line, feeling jumpy in the pit of my stomach. I asked the flight attendant for some caffeine. Something shamefully strong, I added. I was no longer worried about appearances, and it had been a while since I had gotten a good night’s sleep, so I needed the boost.

Uwe would be with the Chechen armistice monitoring group. That was where I was headed.

Pretty much everyone in the world knew that Russia’s only real concern in the region was control of the pipeline. It was a thorn in the side of every admedistration in the world, I was sure, that we hadn’t completely rid ourselves of the decidedly environmentally unaware oil economy. Fossil fuels

<list:item>

<i: produce carbon dioxide.>
<i: produce heat.>

<i: pollute the land and the atmosphere.>

<i: are all-around nasty stuff.>

</list>

Unclean, unsafe, uncool.

Still, there were classic engines around that wouldn’t run without oil, and products made from oil. Compared to a hundred years earlier when the world had been in the grip of the black gold, oil had lost much of its allure, though it still clung to a vital position in the global market.

As Dubai had become an economic center thanks to the performance of the oil sector, Baghdad had vaulted to its current status as an economic powerhouse on the shoulders of the medical conglomerates. As the saying goes, trust in Allah, but be sure to tie up your camel. The Middle East had gone through a chaotic period of runaway fundamentalism before emerging into a more practical, tie-up-your-camel age. The smarter governments in the region had already begun uprooting their stakes in oil.

The old-style government of Russia remained the largest single system among the clustered admedistrations that controlled Eurasia, though this hadn’t kept the admedistrations from roundly criticizing their oversized neighbor’s policies when it came to control of the oil pipeline. Not a few admedistration commissioners had wondered openly why Geneva Convention forces had been pulled in to help Russia enforce its claims of ownership.

Russia, the nation, wanted war with Chechnya. Russia, the collection of admedistrations, each wanted to save the Chechens from their own unhealthy ways, and they each had different ideas as to how best to achieve their goal. This meant that Uwe was dealing with far more than just armed Chechen groups, the Chechen government, and the Russian government. There were over a hundred different admedistrations within Russia, and all of them had something to say, and all of them said it to him. Russia, eager to generate international support, had invited the Helix Inspection Agency in to investigate, whereupon they found that the Chechen people were not living sufficiently lifeist, healthy lives, which gave Russia a sufficient pretext to call in the Geneva Convention troops.

Oddly enough, for the last several days Uwe’s work had been relatively tranquil. The mass suicides and the declaration and the possible second coming of the Maelstrom had kept the people who were responsible for sending him multi-gigabyte reports detailing their specific demands busy—either killing someone or hiding in their houses or summer cottages.

“Uwe? Duty calls.”

The Helix Inspection Agency office within the Chechnya Armistice Monitoring Group camp had been built in the ruins of an old city hall. I pressed my finger to the door to give my ID and let myself in. Uwe was asleep at his desk amid a mountain of printouts.

“Wakey, wakey,” I said, giving him a slap on the back.

He blinked and looked befuddled for a second before his WatchMe kicked in and stimulated him to full alert mode. “Oh, hey, Tuan. Heard you were coming from Prime. She didn’t deign to tell me why, though.”

“Quite the office you got here. Isn’t all this paper a fire hazard?”

“Meh. ThingList + NoTime = WhyClean?”

“Another victim of ThingList, huh? That seems to be going around.”

Uwe shrugged his shoulders and cleared a teetering pile of papers from his desk onto the floor with a sigh.

“Have you been briefed on my current strategic action?”

Uwe raised an eyebrow. “Strategic action? I heard you were leading a one-woman idiot brigade, Miss Senior Inspector Tuan Kirie.”

“Well let’s make it two idiots then. I need your help.”

“Let me guess. This has something to do with the six thousand suicides and the enforced murder dictate,” Uwe said, though his expression told me that he really didn’t know why I was here.

“That’s right. You’re familiar with the Anti-Russian Freedom Front?”

“Very. I arrange police protection for their negotiations—we’ve had a few with them already. Been trying to get them to agree to a lifestyle survey. They’re one of Russia’s top worries, but those of us wearing this symbol have to at least pretend to be neutral parties.” He tapped the entwined serpents around the staff on his shirt.

“What makes them a top worry?”

“They’re real good at moving around through the mountains. Guerrilla warfare at its finest. With all the cliffs and ravines up there, you can’t even get a WarDog or WarDoll into play, so surrogate combat is completely out. Russia’s been hiring every military resource supplier they can find to hit them where it hurts…and every single one has come running back down the mountain with their tails between their legs. What they really need is an elite squad—which the Russian national army has, but they’re very reluctant to put actual soldiers into combat situations. I mean, hey, they might die for real. Not very popular with the folks back home. We spend all this tax money on robots, so why do you go sending people in to die? That sort of thing. It’s a waste of human resources, and all that.”

So Russia had gotten her fingers burned by the Freedom Front, and most of their people were probably in Moscow and St. Petersburg anyway, trying to keep the recent chaos in check. This meant that troops would be light on the ground out here on the front lines. I couldn’t have picked a better time to contact the resistance.

“You still have an open channel with the Freedom Front?” I asked, suddenly recalling Vashlov’s face as he said those words with his dying breaths.

“’Course. That’s my job, after all.”

“I need to get in contact with them. Right now.”

Uwe’s eyes went from narrow with suspicion to wide open. Boy he’s easy to read.

“You kidding? It’s way too dangerous. Whenever we hold negotiations we have to set a meeting place days in advance and arrange for contracted security. It’s not something that can happen right now or even forty-eight hours from now.”

“I don’t need protection. I have something to give to one of the leaders of the front. Something very, very small. I don’t even have to meet them in person, just get it to someone who can get it to them. Don’t tell me you can’t even do that?”

Uwe scrunched down into his gelatin seat and began tapping one finger on his chin. My guess was he was worried less about how to pull off my request and more about whether or not I was worth the trouble.

“Know what Stauffenberg told me?” I said. It wasn’t really my style, but if there was ever a time to pull rank, now was it. “She said the fate of the world was resting on my shoulders.”

“For real?”

“Feel free to call her up on your HeadPhone.”

“No thanks. I spend enough time trying to avoid her calls as it is.”

Uwe turned to look me straight in the eye and smiled. I detected a glimmer of irony. “This must be pretty serious for you to go pulling the Os Cara card.”

“People are dying all over the world right now, and a lot more will be soon. If that’s not serious enough, I don’t know what is.”

Uwe stretched in his chair and laughed out loud. The sound echoed off the walls of the spacious room. “No, no. I’m surprised you are serious about this, Tuan. I know your profile. I’ve heard the stories. Don’t tell me you give a shit about what’s going on in the world. You have some personal connection to this, don’t you? That, and the thing with your dad—sorry about that, by the way. You don’t strike me as the vengeful type, so I’m going to say you’re after something. A little revenge on the side would just sweeten the deal. Look, I’m not one to point fingers. I’m here in this camp half for the booze and the smokes myself. As are the guys we got from your Niger operation. You’re not the only one who wandered out here to get out of the kindness compactor and found themselves somehow responsible for the well-being of the whole fucking world.”

I was shocked, a little, to find that there were others of like mind outside of the crew I had cultivated at my old post.

“You’re working for yourself. Admit that, and I’ll do what I can to help you.”

I sighed, though to tell the truth I wasn’t unhappy. I was starting to like this guy. “You might say it’s a private affair.”

“Private, eh? Sexy. I approve.” Uwe’s lips curled into a smile and his hand went to one ear to make a call. “Call the kid from the Fawn, will you? I doubt they have much business these days anyway. Right. Later.”

≡

The Fawn was an eatery across the street from the old city hall where the camp was located. Much to my surprise, they had beer on the menu. Previously, their clientele had been mostly city officials. Portraits of several soldiers had been printed out and hung on the walls—memories of numerous conflicts this land had seen. I asked about them and Uwe chuckled.

“Those aren’t printouts, Tuan. They’re called photographs.”

“Photographs?”

“Yeah. Bitch to make. You need all this film and photo paper and developing fluid. Really annoying protocol. It’s not like just changing the cartridge in your printer.”

“Another dead medium, then.”

“Guilty as charged. Though for dead media, it’s still pretty alive in these parts.”

“Speaking of things I thought were dead and gone, I’m a little surprised they’ve got beer on the menu.”

“Yeah. That’s the kind of thing the Russians love to grumble about,” Uwe said with a grin. “I can’t tell you how many thousands of reports I’ve read about the ‘shocking consumption of dangerous libations in this hopelessly backward region.’”

“I can imagine.”

“Funny thing is, I looked into it and it turns out that out of all the thousands of admedistrations in the world, only twentysix have laws on the books actually prohibiting alcohol. Just twenty-six that forbid their members to imbibe. In all the rest, it’s just not done.”

“I’m sure the SA analysts have something to do with that.”

“Oh, I know. That’s how the social assessment points work. As long as enough people agree about something, it starts being reflected in your points, and before you know it, you’d better behave or else. And enforcement is built in.”

I smiled. “You know, I think this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

“How nice of you to say that. I wouldn’t mind—ah, here comes the food.”

We were alone in the restaurant. The proprietor brought out our food on a large platter, placing it on our table before retreating to the kitchen.

“You think he’s wondering what he should do before the deadline?” I asked, eyeing the retreating man.

“I doubt it. I certainly haven’t given it any thought.”

“That so?”

“You can believe me or not, makes no difference to me. I plan on taking whatever happens that day as it comes. More importantly, this here’s a Chechen specialty. Zhizhig galnash. In other words, meat.”

It was, literally, a mound of meat on a bed of what looked like penne. I dug in, the stench of mutton filling my nose. “You dip it in this,” Uwe said, pushing a saucer of garlic oil across the table. It did a lot to improve the flavor. Still, the meat was unbelievably tough. I really had to go at it with fork and knife for a while before I made any progress.

The dishes kept coming out. There were lamb dumplings. And then more lamb. Eager to wash the taste out of my mouth, I found myself ordering a beer—right in front of a fellow Helix agent.

“Good call. I’ll have one too. Don’t see anyone else coming in tonight anyway.”

“How do fool your WatchMe?”

“Ah, turns out that by agency regulations, the health risks associated with any consumption of alcohol during negotiations in regions where drinking is common isn’t counted in your SA score. All I have to do is write a report. You went the DummyMe route, am I right? My way involves a little paperwork, but you got to hand it to the agency for showing a little common sense now and then.”

“I had no idea.”

“Few people do. Myself, I prefer to enjoy life, so I spend a lot of time finding loopholes in the system.”

The proprietor brought out chicken pilaf next. I looked up from my plate to see a boy tapping Uwe on the shoulder. When did he get in here, I wondered. He certainly hadn’t come in through the front door. He was wearing a necklace of spent rifle cartridges over a woven ethnic shawl of some sort. Maybe a warrior, and a young one at that. Uwe turned around and said something to him, upon which the boy faced me and stuck out his hand.

“He says give him whatever it is you have for his boss,” Uwe explained.

I pulled a scrap of paper out of my pocket.

“What, just a piece of paper?” Uwe asked, and I assured him that was all. I told the boy to make sure his boss got it, and Uwe translated for me. The boy nodded, a serious look on his face, and slipped out through the back door of the bar.

“You sure that was all you wanted to give him?”

“I am. Better dig in. Your pilaf’s getting cold.”

“Not a bad idea—and since we’re both here on business, we don’t have to worry about oil or cholesterol or any moral concerns. Let’s eat!”

≡

We stuffed ourselves and went back to Uwe’s office, where he found a single folded piece of paper sitting on his desk. He frowned. “You got a response. That was quick.”

I stepped in front of him and picked up the piece of paper. It began with a line of numbers: coordinates. And then a single word. ALONE.

“That’s waaay out in the mountains,” Uwe said.

I called up WorldVision in my AR and inputted the numbers. A visualization of the world appeared spinning in front of me until I was looking at Eurasia, then the line of the Caucasus in between the Black and Caspian seas. When the texture of the mountainsides became clear, I found I was looking at a rock-strewn hillside with a few straight lines defining the edges of something rectangular in the middle of it.

“That’s a bunker. Pretty old by the looks of it. Must’ve been some Russians holed up to get away from the bombs last century or at the beginning of this one.”

“I’m going. Think you can get me part of the way there?”

“By yourself? No way.”

“I noticed your six-legger out front is armored.”

“Yeah, it’s got a cannon. I forget how many millimeters. That’s an armed transport-use coolie goat.”

“Then I’ll need two days worth of food in bags on that thing. If you can get a truck to carry me and the goat as far as the road goes, that’ll be fine.”

“What about contracted security?”

“Won’t need it.”

“Then you’ll be taking a one-way trip. I can’t stand by and watch you do that.”

Uwe was a surprisingly considerate man. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You wanted me to admit it, so here goes. This is a very personal mission for me. An extremely private mission.”

“We’re talking about your life here. I don’t care how private your reasons are.”

“No, we’re talking about the life of every admedistration civilian in the world. Compared to that, I’m nothing at all. Remember what Stauffenberg said, the fate of the world is on my shoulders. This is something I need to pull off on my own.”

Uwe stared at me for a moment, not really buying my story. Then, at last, he shrugged. “You really do think about nothing other than yourself, do you?”

“That’s right. Like you said, I’m very serious about this. And yeah, I don’t give a shit what happens to the world.”

“That’s not very constructive of you, but I can’t say I disapprove. Hey, I’m mostly in this job for the beer and the smokes myself.”

Uwe put a hand to his ear and began talking to someone.

“Yuri? Hello? Uwe here. I need someone to carry a woman and a transport goat up into the mountains. Yeah, right away.”

I could feel the wind growing colder against my skin with every gain in elevation.

It was just me and the six-legged goat in the back of the truck. The goat had been put together to army specs, so no pink was involved. Everything was drab olive, smoky, dirty— the colors of war. I had been told that the six-legger’s control mechanism consisted of cultivated horse nerves specially trained for the environment. The original horse came from local stock, so they were used to the mountains, Uwe said. It bore a Geneva Convention Forces stencil on its amply armored side. There were cultivated parts, muscles extracted from an actual mountain goat, and a complex network of machinery, making it impossible to tell whether it was more biological or mechanical.

The goat had no head, and it would have taken considerable imagination to call the sensors bristling from its front end a face. The closest I could get to making sense of it was to think of it as a mountain goat with its head lopped off.

We went rocking and swaying up the mountain road for some time, but not once did the driver look back to talk to me. Not that I would have been able to respond, not knowing Russian. I was beginning to feel a strange affinity for my cybernetic companion when the truck came to a lurching stop.

The back opened, and the driver was standing outside, motioning me to exit. I gave the goat a slap on the rump and it stood smoothly under its heavy load and hopped down onto the gravelly path. I scanned an aerial photograph of our surroundings linked to the GPS in my AR. It would take a half day or more from here to reach the bunker site. There was hardly a path at all, but my high-resolution satellite imagery would make the going relatively painless. I waved to the driver and thanked him. He went back down the road without a word.

I was now thoroughly in the mountains. The rocky face of the Caucasus was black. According to Uwe, the name came from a Greek mutation of an ancient Scythian word meaning “white snow.” Chechnya was to the north of the mountains, and our truck was now near the top of the range, close to the Georgian border to the south. The only snow on the Caucasus was at the peaks. Below 2,500 meters there was only black rock and dirt.

I started to navigate my way up the rocky slope, the goat deftly picking its way along behind me. I felt like a mountain ascetic on his way to meet the gods, though as soon as I had the thought, I banished it from my mind. I didn’t think of—I didn’t want to think of—Miach as a god.

There were no clouds. The humidity was low, but the sun didn’t feel too hot as of yet. Despite the lack of a path, this was where the Chechen guerrillas had made their home, and I didn’t find the going terribly difficult. I could feel the air in my lungs growing thinner as I climbed. A lack of oxygen wasn’t something even WatchMe and a subdermal medcare unit could fix. I had gone off-line some time ago for that matter. My AR was a local simulation, working off the GPS I carried.

“Being this alone is actually kind of exciting,” I said to the goat.

The goat plodded along in silence.

After three hours in the trackless wilderness, I found something resembling a proper path. According to my navigator, I had another six hours of this before I reached my destination. The path was fairly wide—I even saw traces of tire tracks. Probably left by the Russians during earlier conflicts in the region.

Every once in a while I rested to fill my mouth with water and acclimatize to the air. The transport goat had its own recycler unit embedded, so it didn’t require much in the way of drink. I touched his back, as though it were a pet. It wasn’t all that different from a regular animal. The skin was warm beneath a layer of fur. I had seen a civilian militia charge an army riding on these once, though I had forgotten whether it was in Niger or some other part of Africa.

The army in that conflict had been comprised entirely of remote surrogates. The militia had set off an electromagnetic pulse in the area, cutting the connection between the command center and the surrogates and forcing them to enter automated battle mode. Faced with a completely unexpected cybernetic cavalry charge, the surrogate troops had been decimated.

My goat was a slightly different beast than the ones they had ridden on, mine having been specially engineered for transporting goods in these mountains. The machine gun turret had been added on almost as an afterthought, and frankly I didn’t really see the point. I stood, returned my canteen to its sack on the goat’s back, checked the pistol in the holster at my side, and resumed my ascent.

Climb. Rest. Climb. Rest. Even as I grew used to the air, I could feel my stamina failing. This was a natural sensation that came with a reduction in oxygen—a physical symptom that my internal medcare plant couldn’t hide by tweaking my nervous system as it did with pain and other discomfort. Proof that I was alive.

As history marched on, the range of natural experiences considered acceptable in life had shrunk. Where, I wondered, does one draw the line? Why form a wall around the soul or human consciousness? We had already conquered most natural diseases. We had elevated the myth of a normalized human body to a high public standard.

My thoughts drifted while I climbed.

Take diabetes, for example. In its original form, diabetes was a feature humans had developed that helped to deal with cold climates. Water with glucose has a freezing point below zero—beneficial for people faced with the sudden onset of cold temperatures. Even if the sugar destroyed your veins and your kidneys, you’d still live a decade or two, and if you managed to reproduce during that time it was a big win for your DNA. Diabetes was a vital part of our slipshod evolution.

Qualities that were vital in some circumstances became useless or even dangerous when those circumstances changed. We are just collections of DNA optimized for particular places and times. The human genome was a patchwork of solutions for a thousand different problems. It was easy to think of evolution as meaning forward progress, when in reality we, and all living things, were just assorted attempts at survival.

So why put human consciousness up on the altar? Why worship this strange artifact we had attained? Morality, holiness—these were just things our brains picked up along the way, pieces of the patchwork. We only experienced sadness and joy because they benefited our survival in a particular environment. That said, I couldn’t understand how something like joy was really vital. Nor did I know why sadness and despair had helped us survive.

Still, like diabetes, what if the useful shelf life of our emotions had expired some time ago? What if an environment that required us to feel emotions and possess a consciousness was gone? Why hesitate to cure our brains of emotions and consciousness like we had cured our bodies of diabetes?

Mankind had once required anger.

Mankind had once required joy.

Mankind had once required sadness.

Mankind had once required happiness.

Once, once, once.

My epitaph for an environment, and an age, that had disappeared.

Mankind had once required the belief that “I” was “I.”

Keita Saeki, Gabrielle Étaín, and Nuada Kirie.

My encounters with them had removed any basis I had felt for “me” to exist. Like what my father had said about people with the recessive gene for deafness coupling in Martha’s Vineyard, here people with the recessive gene for the absence of consciousness coupled, and that was normal.

Maybe as long as a society based on mutual aid was in place, outmoded features like consciousness were fated to disappear. Maybe we should embrace the social systems we’d developed and throw out the spawning pool of opposition, hesitation, and anguish that was consciousness altogether.

Where are the whys that drive me located?

Where are the words that protect my soul?

Wasn’t my desire to avenge Cian Reikado and my father’s death just the vestiges of a once-vital but now derelict function of my obsolete simian midbrain?

In the past, it was religion that guaranteed “I” was “I.” Everything had been laid out by God, so it wasn’t our place to question things. Now society had entirely lost the functions that religion once performed. Because once we accepted that emotions and all other phenomena occurring in the brain were just traits that happened to be beneficial to our survival at some point in the past, most ideas of morality lost their absolute basis. A morality without absolute conviction—an objective morality—was weak. History contained ample proof of this.

At any rate, today I was going to meet Miach Mihie.

I expected she would have some answers to all this.

After several more breaks, I reached the bunker just as the sun was slipping below the jagged horizon. I could see clouds gathering far off in the distance, and I wondered what elevation I had reached.

One corner of the bunker jutted out from the mountain face, a smooth panel of concrete against the rough edges of rock, with an open doorway in its center.

“Wait here, goaty.”

I used my fingerprint to lock the goat’s weapon systems and checked my own sidearm.

<list:protocol>

<p: Check the spring on the magazine.>
<p: Remove and reinsert the rounds.>

<p: Pull back the slide until it locks, then:>

<p: Check if there are any rounds in the chamber.>

<p: Carefully check the action of all other parts, depending on the type of firearm.>

</list>

“Okay. I can do this,” I muttered to myself, stepping into the reinforced concrete bunker dug into the mountainside.

“Hello there, Tuan. How long has it been, thirteen years?” came a voice from the darkness inside. The only sounds were the dripping of water and the scuffing of my feet on the ground. I pulled my gun from its holster, the sound of my clothes rubbing together loud in my ears.

“You won’t need your gun. We’re the only ones here, Tuan. Just me and you.”

One step.

Then another.

I switched my AR to light-enhancement mode, revealing the interior of the dimly lit bunker.

“I knew you’d come. I knew you were the only one who’d come.”

I had left the entrance behind me now, where the goat patiently awaited my return.

“I’m right over here, Tuan.”

Miach Mihie appeared as if out of thin air, right in front of the raised barrel of my gun.

She looked almost the same as she had the last time I saw her, when we had been little girls.

“It was a nice idea, bringing my business card. The one I gave you back in high school. I knew it was you right away,” Miach said, raising the card I’d brought from my desk back in Japan. The one I had handed to the messenger boy at the Fawn.

“I knew you would,” I said, keeping the barrel pointed at her. “Vashlov told me you were here.”

“I’m sorry about Vashlov, and about your father.”

Strangely enough, hearing it from Miach didn’t make the blood rush to my head, though I could feel the rage simmering down inside somewhere along with my memories of Cian Reikado.

“I was sure you’d say it couldn’t be helped.”

“Okay, I will. It couldn’t be helped.”

I pulled the trigger. The bullet scraped Miach’s white cheek, leaving a single red line to mark its path.

“Not from where I’m standing. No one had to die.”

“I can see that,” she said. “And I hope no one else has to leave this world.”

“Roughly six thousand people attempted to commit suicide, and of them, nearly three thousand were successful. All lifeist society has been plunged into a murderous mayhem by your one-person, one-kill declaration. And you hope no one else has to die?”

“We had to do all that, otherwise the old geezers wouldn’t push the button.”

“Wouldn’t push the—”

And then it was all clear to me.

I knew what Miach was thinking.

I knew exactly what scenario Miach had painted for the world. I stood with my mouth hanging open, gun still pointed at her.

“That’s right, Tuan,” she said. “We want Harmony.”

It was the day we took those pills.

“I’m taking those things that gave me strength along with me,” Miach said.

I had gotten a call from her and come out to the river just as the sun was beginning to set that night. She was pouring gasoline from a plastic container onto a massive pile of books lying on the riverbank. I have no idea how she’d managed to get them all there. I asked her what she was doing, realizing as I did what an obvious question it was, and yet also feeling that it was my expected role to ask regardless.

“I’m going to burn them. Every one of them.”

If that were true, then the pile of books here represented her entire library, painstakingly compiled over years of allowance. I’d never been to her house at that point, so I had no way of knowing whether these were all of her books. Yet it seemed unlikely that Miach would lie about it.

“I don’t think I could go with these still here.”

“Go where?”

Miach waved her hand at our surroundings, no, at the entire world. “To the other side, away from here. To the place people call heaven or hell. To nothing. I’m afraid these little ones would hold me back, keep me bound here. Besides, if I waited any longer, I’d be too weak to carry them.”

Miach emptied the last drop from the plastic tank she carried. She looked inside and made a face, then pointed the tank mouth toward me.

“Ugh. Gasoline smells terrible. Want a whiff?”

I respectfully declined.

“When a new emperor came into power in China, they would burn all the history books. So they could write new histories,” Miach told me as she screwed the cap back on.

I nodded appreciatively, enjoying the feeling of agreeing with her. Whenever I did that, it felt like Miach was recording a little bit of herself onto me.

“Then, at some point, the whole world became a giant book,” Miach said. People thought they could record everything, so they did.

The advent of the CAT scan changed the world.

X-rays were just photographs, but CAT scans were X-rays taken from multiple angles, combined into images by formulas applied by computers before being output in a visual manner. A photograph was a representation, but a CAT scan was a record.

“You think WatchMe is like a part of that?” I asked.

Miach pulled some matches from a pocket and nodded. “It’s the ultimate form of body-recording.”

Our bodies were being replaced by a record, and it all began with a CAT scan. Whatever happened next would be only a matter of degree. It was constant, and it was already happening. That was what WatchMe was intended to achieve. “That’s why I want to die as a little girl, before I put that thing in my body, before I become something that’s read, like a book.”

To prove that these tits, this ass, this belly, aren’t a book.

“Why do you think people write things?”

I shrugged.

“Because words remain. Maybe for an eternity. Or at least for something approaching that. The Bible was written for that matter. And the pyramids are kind of a record too.”

People had always been obsessed with the idea of eternity. No other age had ever convinced more people that their bodies were eternal things. Old age still hung on, a weak, nearly silenced cry of nature, that would doubtlessly soon be conquered. Barbarism had been conquered. “Maybe the Maelstrom was a form of rehabilitation, returning the balance of things to their natural state,” Miach said with a sigh.

Miach walked over to where I stood behind her, watching.

“What?” I said, and she pressed the matches into my right hand and closed my fingers around them. Her cool hands felt good against my skin.

“Could you do this for me? I made it this far, but I don’t think I can do the rest.”

“Okay,” I said.

Like an athlete lighting a sacred flame, I solemnly tossed a match onto the pile of books. The fire caught in an instant, reducing the pile to ash in a matter of moments. The setting sun painted the riverbank with strange light, while the plasma glow of the fire lit us up from below.

“They used to burn bodies like this in Japan.”

“Really?”

“Of course, that all changed with the Maelstrom.” Miach smiled. Everything had changed. After the great chaos came the great control. And that hardened so fast it could never be shaken.

“They called it cremation. They would put the things the person loved in their life inside the coffin with them. That custom ended when they started liquefying bodies.”

“Is this your cremation, Miach?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Because they won’t put these books in my coffin. They gave me strength, so I’m taking them with me.”

We stood there for a long time, until the sun had set, and Miach’s books had burned out and Miach’s cremation was over. Then we sat on the riverbank and looked out at the town. Miach appointed names for the buildings with one finger, saying, “That’s eternity. That’s the castle of people who believe themselves to be eternal. There’s the king. There’s the government. Those are the old names for the stronghold of rule that the admedistrations have divided into tiny little pieces.

“I want to kick their eternity in the shins. Catch it with a sucker punch.

“I want to hit their frozen time where it hurts.”

“Is that what our deaths will be?” I asked. “Will the world change?”

“Everything will, for us,” Miach replied.

</recollection>

“We’ve come all this way,” Miach said, and she danced a little jig in one spot. Tap tap tap. She was a little taller, and her tits were more substantial than mine. But she was still a cute little girl.

“What do you mean, ‘all this way’?”

“To a brave new world.”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

“I’m talking about a utopia, Tuan Kirie. A World State. Like in Aldous Huxley’s book.”

Tap tap.

“Will we strive for paradise, or will we strive for the truth? After the Maelstrom, mankind chose paradise. We chose a false eternity; we chose to deny that we are nothing more than a collection of adaptation patches applied via the evolutionary process to fit this or that situation. We could have it, if only we could suppress nature. If we could make everything around us artificial, it could be ours. And we’ve already crossed the point of no return.”

I frowned, still holding up my gun.

Wasn’t it you who hated that world? Wasn’t it you who denied it? You, Miach Mihie?

Ta-ta-tap.

“My father told me that you were—”

“That’s right, a person without a consciousness. Or you might say, someone who doesn’t require a consciousness. I should say I was a person without a consciousness, now that I’ve gone and gotten myself one. It was born here.”

Miach spread her arms and twirled like a ballerina, showing me the concrete cave.

Phweew, phweew, phweew.

The wind whipping across the heights of the Caucasus made a sad sound like a flute as it passed through the opening to the bunker.

Phweew, phweew, phweew.

“This was the base of operations for the Russian army’s prostitution ring. The girls they caught on the battlefield were raped here by the Russian soldiers every day.”

Phweew, phweew.

“One of the generals who raped me used to make me touch his antique Tokarev while he penetrated me again and again. This is a gun, he’d say, this is steel, this is power—like it was his second penis. He would stick it in my mouth and make me suck it, over and over and over.”

I was already crying.

And wondering what sort of consciousness it took to think about such things and say them so calmly, so brightly.

Phweew, phweew, phweew.

I put a hand to my mouth, holding back a wave of nausea.

“I had the gun in my mouth, was covering it with my own saliva, when my consciousness awoke. This concrete cave is filled with juices—semen, vaginal secretions, blood, tears, snot, and sweat. In that liquid I was born again.”

Ta-tap, ta-tap, ta-tap.

“In the end, some vigilantes and an MRS the Chechens had hired saved me. I was picked up by a Japanese adoption agency program seeking to counter the declining population problem, and came to Japan.”

“You told me,” I managed to say, my eyes and nose running. At some point I had lost the ability to keep my emotions dammed up inside me. “You told me you hated this world. The world of love-and-be-loved that tried to strangle you with kindness. But was it really so bad? Was it worse than Chechnya? Was our society a more terrible place than this bunker?”

“I didn’t know what to do,” Miach said.

Ta-ta-tap.

“When I was twelve years old, the boy living next door to me hanged himself.”

Ta-ta-tap, ta-ta-tap, ta-ta-tap.

“He said he hated this world, that he didn’t belong here, and he died. I thought about that. I knew how barbaric people could be. And I knew how broken they could become when they tried to repress that nature. I thought that this society, admedistrative society, this lifeist system was all wrong. A society that wanted me to regulate myself internally, even while people were killing themselves all around me, was just bizarre.”

It was true that Miach’s passion had given me and Cian a different view of the world and of a society based on the constant monitoring of the human body and health as a value above all others. A society where rigid self-monitoring was the only path to peace and harmony.

“That’s right, you hated the system of the world. That’s why when you asked us to die, me and Cian said yes.”

Something about the way I was speaking reminded me of how I talked back in high school. Like when I had been a little girl, eating my lunch with Miach Mihie and Cian Reikado.

“But I learned something when I left with your father, Tuan.”

“What?”

“That people can change. If people can break through the barrier of consciousness.”

Ta-ta-tap tap. Ta-ta-tap tap.

“So you didn’t cultivate this chaos because you hate the world,” I said, lowering my gun at last.

Miach continued her dance for an audience of one. “That’s right. I love it. I love it with all my being—and I want to affirm it. I want to cure the world of its infection, its ‘me’s and ‘I’s.” Miach looked serious. Her dance quickened. “I wrote most of the source code for the neural network your father and his friends installed into the midbrain of every WatchMe user in the world. There were backdoors in the WatchMe control systems of several admedistrations. Backdoors left for us. With such access, it was easy to create a hyperbolic desire for death in many people.”

All they had to do was reset the value of death as greater than the person’s will for life for the victim to choose oblivion. For those people who quite suddenly found death to be irresistibly attractive, a choice to make, there was no avoiding the erroneous value system’s effect.

“But the old folks got scared.”

“The ones running the Next-Gen group.”

“Yes, and your father was the ideologue at their center.”

“Ah yes. His proclamation that the creation of a perfect person for our society would make the soul a useless artifact. Funny, isn’t it?”

“I wasn’t laughing.” Miach stopped her dance and brought her hands together with a loud clap. I heard echoes run through the dark bunker. “I realized that’s what we had to do. There are tens of thousands of girls and boys killing themselves in the world right now. Adults too. We can never remove the barbarism of nature from ourselves completely. We can’t forget that before we are little admedistrative collectives, before we are part of a system or network of relationships, we are animals, plain and simple—a patchwork assortment of functions and logic and emotion all tied together into a bundle.”

“So you thought that if people were dying because they couldn’t get used to this world—”

“Yes. That we should give up being human in the first place.”

Ta-tap, ta-tap, ta-tap.

Miach resumed her light dance. “By which I mean, we should give up being conscious. We should give up our roughshod armor and become part of the society gnawing at our bones. We should give up being ourselves. Get rid of ‘me’ and consciousness and everything else our environment foisted on us. Only then can our society reach the harmony it was striving for.”

Ta-ta-ta-ta-tap, ta-tap, ta-tap-ta.

“They used to tell soldiers they weren’t supposed to wear boots to fit their bodies, they were supposed to fit their bodies into their boots. And we can do that, easily.”

“If the old folks would agree with you.”

Once again, Miach’s dance ceased. She let her shoulders fall with a sigh. “That’s right. The old folks think the end of consciousness is a kind of death. Even though there had been a minority living in the Caucasus mountains for thousands of years without anything like a consciousness. As long as a mature system is in place, there is no need for conscious decisions. We have a sufficiently mutually beneficial system, we have software to tell us how to live, we’ve outsourced everything possible, so what need have we of consciousness? The problem isn’t our consciousness, it’s the pain that our having a consciousness brings us when we are forced to regulate ourselves for health or for the community.”

“We don’t need a will, we don’t need consciousness. And how does this connect with the chaos in the world now?”

“It’s easy. If the world is teetering on the brink of destruction, the old folks will have no choice but to press the button.”

Of course. It was so simple.

“So you’re pushing them to a place where they’ll have to take our consciousnesses away?”

“That’s right.”

“You’ve engineered this whole situation, then?”

“That’s right. Technically speaking, it’s not an actual button. It’s a series of codes.”

Codes. A string of letters telling the world to be a certain way.

That the world is so.

“We tried to grab that authority ourselves but were unable to. That’s when the split in the Next-Gen group happened. The main group believes that the reflective consciousness, the part that says ‘I am me,’ must be respected as a vital part of humanity. The minority group, which is us, believe that in our perfected social system, only the human brain remains, and consciousness is only good for unhappiness and should be swept away. They called us heretics, which is why I had to run away, back to the Chechens who had saved me before.”

Miach and her cohorts had used the authority they had to the fullest.

They had infiltrated several admedistration servers to which they had access and were able to directly change the value system lodged in the midbrains of constituents. Yet the old guard, despite their memories of the Maelstrom, and ironically the ones who still revered the soul, retained a firm grip on the power of human consciousness. And according to Miach, it had been my dad who held the line with the most determination of all.

I remembered that day when I was eight or nine when that woman in the session chewed out my dad about caffeine. He had folded before her then, his self-respect melting like ice cream on a summer day, but here, he had believed in the human soul, and consciousness, and the existence of “me” till the end.

I felt myself growing sad. Sad about how my father had died. This was more than enough reason to want to avenge him.

“Your father was veeery stubborn,” Miach said, smiling and pointing at me. “He saw the hundreds of thousands of people dying in the worst way possible—suicide—and he pitied them, yet he still claimed we needed our human wills, our consciousnesses. I disagreed. I felt like I had to do something. I wanted to make a world with no souls, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of souls we lose every year.”

Phweew, phweew, phwee, phweew.

Phweew, phweew, phweew.

The wind blew through the bunker past where we were standing.

I raised my gun again, letting the front sight straight at Miach’s heart, the barrel pointed toward Miach.

“Cian died. My father died. You killed them.”

Miach nodded, her face severe. “I had to. Note that they were randomly selected from all potential targets.”

“My father’s death wasn’t random.”

“That’s true. Your father died for his beliefs.” She pointed at the gun in my hand. “What about you, Tuan Kirie?”

I listened to my own voice speaking inside me. Would this voice go away if I lost my consciousness, my will? Would my consciousness, my individuality, disperse, leaving only a system behind? Leaving only a self-evident me? Would I do what I was supposed to do, never wondering, always working, my various functions all handled automatically?

The harmonious brain is a brain with all uncertainty removed. No, discarded.

With no uncertainty, there were no choices. With no choices, everything simply was.

I understood that everything around me would look exactly the way it always had. If human consciousness had never done anything of great importance, its loss would change little.

People go shopping, just like they did the day before.

People go to work, just as they had the day before.

People would laugh like they did the day before.

People would cry like they did the day before.

All reactions would be clear and simple. Doing things because they were what you were supposed to do.

Wasn’t this just some rite of passage we all had to go through in order to create the coming eternity?

I thought that maybe it was.

No objections.

≡

“So you wanted to go back to your life without a consciousness. To the way your people used to be.”

Miach looked down, then nodded slightly. “Maybe that’s true. Yes, I think you’re right.”

“So by taking that away, maybe I can have my revenge.”

“Huh?”

Miach blinked. Revenge? It was like she hadn’t even once considered the idea the whole time I was making my way to her hiding place, carrying Cian’s and my father’s deaths with me.

It was enough to make me want to laugh. She was Miach Mihie all right, this girl. Oddly enough, it was a relief.

Say, Miach. You know how many times I’ve thought about killing you between the moment Cian Reikado’s face hit her caprese and when I found my way to your bunker in Chechnya?

“Cian didn’t have to die. That’s why you called her to tell her she had to.”

“You think?”

“You had to justify your own consciousness, vis-a-vis a reality that had already been decided and could not be stopped.”

“I’m not so sure.”

I nodded, steadying my grip on the gun. “That’s why I’m going to avenge Cian and my father, right here.”

“How?”

“I’m going to make the world you always wanted a reality. And I’m not going to let you be part of it.”

Phweew, phweew, phweew.

I pulled the trigger.

Miach fell to the concrete floor with a thud.

A shrill rush of air spilled from her mouth, along with a tiny voice seemingly wrung from her body that said, “Will you forgive me now?”

“For Cian and my father?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve had my revenge.”

I reached down and stroked Miach’s hair where she lay. A single rivulet of red blood running from one corner of her mouth was beautiful against her white skin. Her eyes looked weakly down at the floor where those men had reveled in their barbarism.

“Please, take me with you.”

“To where?”

“A place where…I can see the Caucasus.”

Miach was bleeding from the two holes my bullets had left in her chest.

One for Cian.

One for my father.

I threw her over my shoulder and walked through the bunker. It was just like Miach always said. Like Uwe said. I didn’t care what happened to the world. No matter what the mobs crushing down on the pink-camouflaged soldiers and their useless nonlethal weapons were going to do. No matter how men with knives cut at each other. No matter if the old folks entered the final code to stop it all.

I brought Miach out to the corner of the bunker where it stuck out over the side of the mountain like a stage. Snow came drifting in through the open entranceway.

White snow on the black mountains.

I saw them stretching off into the distance, their crowns capped with ice.

“Will you stay and watch?”

“Watch what?”

“Watch my consciousness end.”

I nodded.

I had fired the bullets. They were fired by no one else’s will but mine.

I did it. I did it.

Me.

The last white puff of breath came from Miach Mihie’s mouth.

Her body, her brain, lost their warmth, and her consciousness— that which made her Miach—faded, thanks to that simple, ancient mechanism known as death. It didn’t make a difference that her consciousness had been an emulation in her cerebrum.

I stood in the whirling snow that came inside the bunker for a moment.

The sound of a drop of blood falling from Miach’s spent shell brought me back to my senses.

“It’s cold here,” I said to the backdrop of the mountains, holding Miach in my arms.

I felt a cold creep across my cheeks.

I wondered where my body ended and the cold air began.

The boundary was already vague in my mind.

Phweew, phweew, phweew, phweew.

Goodbye, me.

Good

bye,

m—

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