<part:number=03:title=Me, I’m Not/>

<part:number=03:title=Me, I’m Not/>

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01

One thing the declaration achieved was to make everyone in the world shut up for a moment. What were you doing when you heard it?

It was cloudy in this city that day. This city being the capital of Japan.

The clouds hung heavy, gray lumps in the sky over the city, waiting to crush the people who braved the streets. Or maybe I was seeing symbolism in everything due to shock.

Reports said some people got sick just hearing it. Many more reported for immediate therapy. When I heard it, I was in my car driving toward the airport with a passenger—the man with the business cards.

<recollection>

                 “Ever heard of a business card?”

                 We were sitting in the classroom during recess time when Miach showed us a small piece of paper.

                 It was rectangular, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and there were words on it: our school name, our class number, and in larger text below that, Miach Mihie.

                 “Check it out. People used to use these to introduce themselves.”

                 Cian grunted with interest and leaned forward to look at the paper where it lay atop Miach’s desk.

                 “Can’t write much of a profile on that little thing, can you?”

                 Miach nodded. “That’s right. And there’s no link to your SA score or medical info either. The main social unit back in the day used to be your company or school, so you wrote that address here on the card. In fact, most people didn’t even use business cards outside of company interactions. There was no need or means to display personal information at other times.”

                 “Why not?”

                 “Because privacy was so important back then.”

                 “Privacy?” Cian giggled. “Miach, you dog!”

                 “They didn’t have AR like we do, y’know. There were physical limitations to how much information you could get out there.”

                 “That’s true,” I said, adding so that Cian could understand, “You would’ve had to walk around with a big sign around your neck if you wanted to do what we do today.”

                 Cian frowned. “But don’t people kind of roll their eyes at you if you don’t display your creds? Was everyone just shadier back then? And, like, suspicious of each other?”

                 “No, it’s just that you didn’t share your personal information with people like you do now. If you were out in public and someone sat down next to you, you didn’t pay them any attention. Business cards were for when you were obliged to exchange some limited amount of information, and you had to give them to someone else by hand, so it was more targeted than the indiscriminate spray of information we have now.”

                 “It’s kind of cute,” I said, picking up the little scrap of paper.

                 Miach grinned. “Isn’t it? I think it’s way more cute and classy than some AR profile hanging over your head. I knew you’d like it, Tuan.”

                 “Neat, it’s even got a picture!” Cian said, pointing at the colorful illustration on the card. “Did you draw that, Miach? What is it, some kind of symbol?”

                 “Yeah. It’s our symbol.”

                 “Our symbol?”

                 “Yeah. For our trio of comrades. You, me, and Tuan.”

</recollection>

I still had the handmade business card Miach had given me that day in my desk at home. In fact, knowing what a business card was had come in handy once or twice in my work as a Helix agent. I realized that this ancient form of information transfer, completely lost from lifeist society, was still highly valued in negotiations between old-style governments and nations. The Helix agent charged with negotiating cease-fires between the many armed groups in Chechnya and the government in Russia told me that once when he’d produced a business card during a sit-down with one armed group, they’d immediately warmed to him. In places where AR wasn’t yet a part of daily life, the culture of business cards still thrived.

I was remembering all this because of the man who ran up to me in the university parking lot as I was getting into my car and handed me his card.

“Agent Elijah Vashlov, Interpol.”

I took the card from his hand with practiced ease. Agent Vashlov’s eyes widened. “You know what that is?”

“It’s not a business card?”

I glanced at the paper. There was nothing cute about a business card received from a strange man who ran up to you in a parking lot. Nothing cute at all. Besides, with a clear AR display showing me who the guy was anyway, there was no need for business cards, which made this all just a parlor trick.

“I’m familiar with the old custom.”

“Oh, well that’s no fun.”

“I hope you don’t do that to everyone you meet.”

“Actually,” he replied, “I do. Most of them rather like it.”

Vashlov scratched his head sheepishly. He was clearly fond of performance. I asked him what his business was. I’m not made of time, you know.

“How about we talk in your car. We can just drive around.”

“Sorry, but I’m on my way to the airport.” I indicated my car with a jab of my jaw.

“Off to Baghdad, right?”

I stared into the man’s eyes, taking care to hide my surprise. His face betrayed no emotion, though it was clear he’d been trying to catch me off my guard, which meant I was irritating him. That made me glad.

“That’s just what I want to talk to you about,” Vashlov said, his words cool and measured. “Just let me go with you and talk to you on the way to the airport. That’s all I ask. I won’t slow you down.”

After a moment’s hesitation I nodded, and Vashlov told his own car to go home on its own. I got in and set the route, which brought up a display of the predicted time it would take to get to the airport.

“You’ve got one hour,” I told him.

“More than enough,” Vashlov said, getting in next to me.

Something didn’t feel right as we drove through the city streets. Maybe it was the heavy clouds overhead, but something seemed to have added a generous dollop of loneliness to the flat landscape of the city. I stared out the window, trying to dig the source of that loneliness out of the passing scenery with my eyes. I was no more enlightened by the time the car reached the entrance to the expressway and we left the streets behind.

Even the expressway seemed unusually vacant that day. Whatis it? I wondered.

It’s you. You’re lonely, the loneliness answered me.

“With this little traffic, we might get there early,” Vashlov said. Then more quietly he added, “They’re all afraid, you know.”

“Of what?”

“Of someone dying right in front of their eyes. Afraid it might be them.”

That made sense.

I’d heard the therapists were overwhelmed.

How could someone just die, right in front of you?

Forced belief in others was what kept our society running. That was what it meant to take a little bit of everyone around you hostage. In exchange for lives that, save for rare accidents, would never end before their time, we were expected to always keep personal information on display, to participate in admedistration discussions and morality sessions, and to make decisions only after receiving advice from the appropriate expert.

But the gears in the clockwork had warped a little bit after the suicides. Though it had happened in a strange way, the “incident” as people were calling it had reminded them of an old familiar feeling—that others were strangers. That they were unpredictable and often distasteful.

True enough. If normally stable people were capable of committing suicide at the drop of a hat, it was impossible to know whom you could trust. What would happen if they took their own lives the very moment you did decide to trust them? What would that do to you?

I knew what it had done to me. Eternity had crumbled.

We all knew that people were supposed to live for a hundred some-odd years, without ever getting sick or seeing anything troubling. The world was supposed to be a gentle place. A safe place.

<list:dialogue>

                <d: A life span is fixed,  immutable.>
<d: Our world does not change.>

</list>

The illusion had just been smashed to pieces.

What would happen next?

Perhaps imprudently, I was wondering that too. Surely, the suicides hadn’t been the end of it. This had to be part of somebody’s plan—maybe even a still-alive Miach Mihie’s plan. The ones who had committed suicide were simply the first sacrifices that had to be made so that the plan could be put into action.

“Aren’t you scared?” I asked the Interpol agent.

“Of course I am,” he answered calmly.

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

Vashlov shrugged and began. “It was, I think, about a year ago when my section of Interpol began investigating a certain group. The group consists of powerful elders in various admedistrations and the heads of certain medical industrial collectives, as well as a few scholars and scientists. They were researching ways to improperly access people’s WatchMe and medcare units in order to activate a certain technology during crises.”

“What kind of technology?”

“We’re not entirely sure yet. All we know is that they are able to use the admedistration WatchMe servers to access people’s bodies directly. That, and their ideology reflects strong memories of the Maelstrom.”

The Maelstrom—the years of chaos and mushroom clouds that had opened mankind’s eyes to its true nature and inspired our current lifeist society.

“They—these old people—are afraid that humanity will once again fall into the chaos of those years. There are plenty of theories as to why the Maelstrom happened, but one thing it did prove was that our brains are capable of reverting to barbarism with shocking alacrity. And it only took tens of millions of people to die to prove it. Which is why they moved to put all of humanity under observation—through WatchMe. They call themselves the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group.”

I had to collect my thoughts for a moment to process this story of megalomaniacal conspiracy. The man had Interpol ID, and he didn’t seem delusional—it was just that the scale of his conspiracy theory was so grand. He was asking me to believe that all human life was basically under the watchful eye of a select group of people.

“There’s no need to give me that look. I’ll show you my Interpol psych evaluation, if you like.”

“I’m just not sure how to take this.” Of all the things I had anticipated this man telling me, a conspiracy theory was not one of them.

“I completely understand, but you’re going to have to believe me. We do not have much time left.”

“You mean there’s going to be another wave of suicides?”

“Or something like that, yes. On the day of the incident, this group performed a test of their system. Just a test, to see if the technology worked as intended. The test was a success—save for an unexpected mass wave of simultaneous suicides.”

“You mean to tell me that was an accident?”

I found it hard to believe that an organization founded on fear of the Maelstrom, no matter how megalomaniacal, would make a technology capable of ending so many lives and causing so much fear. Wasn’t that exactly what they would be trying to prevent?

“No, not an accident. According to our source, there is another group within this group. Though they share the same objectives, they are directly opposed to the larger group on the issue of the means to that end. A rogue faction, if you will.”

“So this ideological rift within the group was the trigger that caused all those deaths?”

“Rather, what we saw was one act in the confrontation between these two groups. The suicides were a power play by the rogue faction, if you will.”

A little office spat among a group of megalomaniacs, resulting in a mountain of corpses.

“Then why bring this to me?” I asked.

“In order to ask for your help, of course. Rather, we want to help you with your investigation. I’ll be frank. There are elements within Interpol that have not taken kindly to the Helix Inspection Agency inserting themselves into the investigation of the incident. There was quite a heated debate about it. The naysayers felt that this was strictly a criminal case, and that WHO, an admedistration monitoring agency, was using the incident as an excuse to make a grab for more authority.”

“They were probably right.”

Stauffenberg was first and foremost among the expansionists. I had once listened to her give a speech in which she claimed that the Helix Inspection Agency, as defenders of lifeism, had an obligation to deal with any and every threat to human lives or health.

“Even still, with what’s happened, and worse to come, cooperation seems to be the only choice. We do not know when they will make the next move. All we know is that we have to stop them before—excuse me.”

Vashlov put a hand to one ear. Someone calling him on his HeadPhone.

<horror>

                 Unconsciously, I reached up and rubbed the back of my own scalp.

                 Right inside here.

                 Inside the gray matter in my skull.

                 Some old farts, in their fear of the Maelstrom, had built a little medicule network there for me. Our free will was the last thread of ourselves not yet outsourced. Yet there was a mechanism that could take even that away from me, a mechanism controlled by a group of people that didn’t believe in our society, not that they wanted us to believe in it. If that network suddenly ordered me to kill myself, then I would draw the gun I wore at my side and, without a single conflicting thought, shoot myself in the head. I found myself really wanting to know exactly how it would work when the time came.

</horror>

This was the result of outsourcing all our bodily functions. By entrusting our bodies to others through WatchMe, we had reached the point where we could no longer support our own selves without those external mechanisms to help us.

Humans are good at dividing up labor.

<list:protocol>

                <p: Hunt pig.>
<p: Cut up  pig.>

                <p: Cook pig.>

</list>

Food must’ve been a very personal thing for most people in the beginning. Now, the whole process had been divided into so many stages, each with their own specialists. I doubted anyone today really understood the routes food took from its origins to their mouths.

Vashlov tapped me on the shoulder. “Got a news report coming in on Network 24. Check it out.”

I called up a media channel in one corner of my field of vision. I linked to Network 24 and immediately saw the emergency news report tag. A newscaster with a nervous look on his face began reading from the prompter on his AR.

“Good day, this is Edison Carter. What we are about to broadcast is the contents of a memorycel we received at our news bureau just moments ago. The memorycel contains a message from a person claiming responsibility for the recent mass suicide incident.”

“What’s this all about?” I asked Vashlov.

He shook his head in disbelief. “I wish I knew. We’ll just have to watch.”

The self-review committee at Network 24 had a reputation for being a little looser than other media outlets. A short while earlier, the image of a dead soldier appearing in a corner of one frame during a report on the violence in Chechnya had sparked an outcry against the station. Most other media outlets subjected everything they showed to an AI editor before broadcast in order to prevent any possibility of showing something emotionally traumatic. Relatively speaking, then, Network 24 was pretty extreme and as such not entirely worthless as a news source.

“We will begin playback now,” Edison Carter said. The screen went black.

<log:media=Network24:id=225-78495hu6ryti5h23j-09>

                 I’m not sure when they’ll play this, so let me wish you a good morning, a good day, and a good evening.

</log>

It was a female voice, heavily modulated.

There was no picture. Only the words voice only in the middle of the screen.

I closed my eyes. Maybe that way I could hear a kernel of the real person—which could very well have been Miach Mihie.Besides, if there were no picture, what was the point of looking at it?

<log:media=Network24:id=225-78495hu6r-yti5h23j-09>

                 A lot of people have died.

                 A lot of people ended their own lives all at the same time.

                 I’m sure it was shocking.

                 I’m sure you’re frightened at the possibility of seeing someone die before your eyes.

                 We did this.

                 Our methods are, at present, a secret.

                 However, the framework for the method is already inside you, inside each of your brains.

                 It’s too late to take it out now.

                 You are all our hostages.

</log>

I tried to listen through the warbling blips of whatever masking process had been applied to the voice for a trace of Miach Mihie and was unsuccessful.

<log:media=Network24:id=225-78495hu6r-yti5h23j-09>

                 You already know what we are capable of.

                 You’re frightened. You’re angry. You are experiencing many emotions.

                 These emotions are real. Treasure them.

                 Our society has been engineered to suppress your emotions.

                 You are being crushed beneath words of kindness.

                 This is not written anywhere. It is not the law.

                 Yet it binds you all the same. Never has there been a generation so self-regulated. Never has there been a civilization so weighted down by rules not generated from within, but without.

                 No one can say what’s really on their mind. Since we were children, we have been told that we are vital resources to our society. Our bodies do not belong to us, they belong to society at large. They are public property.

                 Haven’t you had enough of it?

                 I am sure you have all heard about the rise in the suicide rate. You’re not the only one who wants to escape.

</log>

The message was a familiar one.

Miach’s words to me and Cian echoed in my head.

Words that had given a clear shape to our suffering.

<log:media=Network24:id=225-78495hu6r-yti5h23j-09>

                 We are going to create a new world.

                 In order to do that, we need to know who is capable of making change.

                 Within the next week, I want you each to kill at least one other person.

                 I don’t care what means you have to use.

                 I want you to prove that you’re capable of doing anything to serve your own ends. Prove that other people don’t matter.

                 Accept the fact that your life is the most important.Revel in it.

                 Those who are unable or unwilling to perform this small task will die.

                 You know we can follow through with this threat. You have seen what we can do.

                 If you should hesitate to take someone else’s life, even if it means saving yourself, then we will kill you without mercy.

                 That is, you will kill yourself.

                 We can do this with the press of a button.

                 For those who do not yet believe us, we will show you proof.

                 You will be able to see it for only a moment.

                 Watch closely.

</log>

“That is all the voice data we have received at Network 24.”The screen switched back to Edison Carter. He was reading from an AR script again. “We traced the origin of the message, however. The person or people who sent it used the ID of one of the recent mass suicide victims.” At that point, the star reporter of Network 24 casually reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a pen, and slammed it into his right eye.

Vashlov covered his eyes.

The AI censor kicked in.

Before Carter began scrambling his own brains on a global feed, the image cut out, replaced by scrolling text apologizing for the emotionally traumatic visuals, and urging all viewers to seek appropriate therapy as soon as possible. They even displayed the ID of the nearest therapeutic center. Like therapy would negate the fact that Carter had just committed suicide in front of the world.

“Shit, I can’t believe I just saw that. Shit!”

Vashlov was muttering under his breath.

On the battlefield, I had seen bodies with their heads blown off, abandoned corpses in advanced states of decay. As such, the image wasn’t a particularly shocking one, but the circumstances were more than enough to give me pause.

If this really was Miach’s doing, the girl needed serious therapy.She needed enough pharmaceuticals and counseling to rewire her brain.

I raced the car on to the airport. There was no time to waste.I had to get to Baghdad before the monster lurking beneath the heavy clouds of kindness awoke and bared its fangs.

02

<recollection>

                 I don’t belong in this world.

                 The first time I had that thought was during an admedistration morality session. I was still in middle school, so I went as an observer with my parents. I say “went,” but the session was in AR. The topics on the table began with some very nuanced, hard to define, and frankly meaningless points about the propriety of certain advertisements.Gradually though—I don’t recall the particulars of how it happened now—the discussion shifted to moral concerns about the use of caffeine.

                 I had always thought that tea was tea.

                 Coffee was coffee.

                 Except that, just like all wine contained alcohol, these beverages contained caffeine.

<antipathy>

                 To this day I remember her clearly, the woman with a big voice who was running the show. I don’t remember her name. She began very demurely, waiting for her turn to take the floor. Yet when she spoke, her words were anything but demure.

                 “I was just wondering if there isn’t a moral problem with the taking of caffeine.”

                 According to her, caffeine was basically

<list:item>

                <i: a stimulant.>
<i: an excitement enhancer.>

                <i: bad for the stomach.>

                <i: an unhealthy  substance.>

</list>

                 “Caffeine is essentially addictive,” the woman said.

                 Very softly.

                 A gentle denunciation.

                 “It just seems to me,” she went on to say, “that there is something indecent about the effects of long-term use.”

</antipathy>

                 “What about those who require the use of caffeine in their occupation?” asked my father, the scientist. This was why I was soon to witness my father being verbally pummeled in public. Which was odd, because as far as I could tell, what he had said was correct, common sense, and altogether noninflammatory.

                 But the woman’s argument was so in line with admedistration ideas of propriety, so modestly put—and so one-sided, so easy to understand, and so filled with determination.

                 Determination after determination.

                 People in the admedistrations liked other people to decide things for them. People who made decisions created an atmosphere. Scientists had always been bad at this. That was because the facts could be dry and were often complex; yet by necessity the truth must be plain enough to withstand repeated inquiry, all of which made it unappealing. So my father told me some time after the session had ended.

                 My father had said that certain occupations required the use of caffeine, and that there were certain kinds of stress that caffeine helped reduce.

<antipathy>

                 “The arguments Mr. Kirie gives us,” the woman said, close to the end of the session, “are quite like the rationales given by those who clung to their tobacco and alcohol habits, even when everyone around them had abandoned the foul things.”

<list:item>

                <i: She indicated evidence that caffeine  caused panic attacks.>
<i: She indicated that caffeine contributed to insomnia.>

                <i: She even went so far as to indicate that caffeine could cause seizures in some  people.>

                <i: She noted that caffeine could act as a trigger for  headaches and amnesia.>

</list>

</antipathy>

                 Not once did my father manage to get the word moderation in edgewise. Though caffeine wasn’t about to be wholly abolished, the atmosphere in the session clearly colored caffeine as a poisonous, indecent substance to be avoided.

<antipathy>

                 I felt sick through most of the session.

                 Not an upset stomach. More of a spiritual queasiness. Like my mind wanted to vomit. To me, the woman was a menace, and I couldn’t understand why everyone in the session seemed to be nodding and swallowing the venomous words she spat out like candy.

                 “I know it’s not very realistic, but I have a dream that someday,” the woman said in closing, “someday caffeine will be entirely abolished.”

</antipathy>
<regret>

                 I regretted having asked my parents to take me with them to the session.

                 I remembered seeing a media channel where they showed picture after picture of food items I had never seen before in my life. When I asked my father what it was, he said they called it the “Two Minutes’ Hate.”

                 “It’s for us, mainly, the last generation who ate food with too much fat, too much cholesterol, too much salt—food that’s bad for your health and not properly resource-aware. We were to watch that and think ‘I can’t eat that. People who eat those things aren’t fit to be in our society. They lack resource awareness. They’re harming their public body.’ It’s a form of self-suggestion.”

                 The program had aired regularly ten years before. And now the kind of hatred against unhealthy food that started with the Two Minutes’ Hate had born fruit in the form of opinions like the one we heard in the session that day—a call for everyone to join in a shared hatred of caffeine.

                 I was proud of my father. He had created WatchMe. He had changed the world. I didn’t want to see him shamed like this. If this was the admedistration, if this was the world, then I didn’t want to be there. This was long before I met Miach, but my feeling of discomfort that day was so severe that I remembered the morality session for a long time afterward. The discomfort followed me to school, and even when I played games at home. It was always there, gnawing at my stomach. I never wanted to go to a session again.

</regret>

                 The first person to notice my discomfort was a girl reading a book by the jungle gym in the park I passed by on my way home from school. She walked up to me and asked if I knew why the jungle gym bars warped the way they did.

</recollection>

≡

“This is BirdRider with an announcement for all passengers. This Northern Passengers 947 DR flight out of Tokyo will be landing in the Baghdad Medopolis in one hour.”

The announcement telling me my arrival time came like a soft whisper in my ear. Very pleasant. Unpleasant things were abhorred in this world.

No disease, no unsettling tastes, no disturbing images. If, by some gross miscalculation, you did happen across any of these things, there were plenty of therapists waiting to help.

A world devoid of unpleasantness. I wondered how much further we had to go until we reached a world devoid of life. The land of the dead.

While the silky soft voice sounded next to my ear, I leaned forward in my seat and looked out the window at the six main wings of the PassengerBird. The wings rippled and changed form, as if they were actually flapping as they curled around invisible currents of air. Back when airplanes had been the main form of aerial transportation, travel hadn’t been half as elegant.

That put me in mind of the jungle gym again. The words from Miach’s lips.

Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, jungle gyms were still made of metal. Not intelligent, not morphable. Not even soft.

<list:item>

                <i: Miach, still alive>
<i: Miach, who didn’t die>
<i: Miach, who didn’t leave us behind>
<i: Miach, who might have killed Cian, and  2,795 other people besides>

</list>

I thought by now I was my own woman, but here I was, chasing after Miach’s shadow again. For most of my time in flight, I had been reading a paper about healthy society that Professor Saeki had recommended to me. It turned out that there were many things the Nazis had started. PA systems, for instance. Before digital delivery and direct feeds to HeadPhones became widespread, these electronic devices magnified one’s voice in order to broadcast information to many people at the same time. The autobahn had been the grandfather of our modern expressway. Funny that it was only scholars who seemed to associate the Nazis with a healthy society.

<recollection>

                 “Hitler’s mother died of breast cancer, you know,” Professor Saeki said. “Her doctor was a Jew. That’s what started Hitler’s hatred of the Jewish people. In other words, the Holocaust was born from Hitler’s mother’s breast…I forget whether it was the right or the left.”

</recollection>

I left my seat and walked up the steps from the passenger area to the café on the PassengerBird’s upper deck lounge. Up here, it was like you were standing on the roof of the Bird. Blue sky stretched in every direction, and the sea of clouds below shone a brilliant white, thick with moisture. Perhaps with this in mind, the floor had been made of a supple white material that gave softly under pressure, visually blending with the clouds at its edges. The walls of the PassengerBird were made of an intelligent material that went transparent when you looked at it, giving its passengers a panoramic view. If it were not for the thin lines of the PassengerBird’s frame, it would have seemed like you were floating in the sky.

Everything in the world is floating in the sky.

When there’s no disease, when time has stopped.

People who take nicotine know nothing of politeness.

Nicotine makes your arteries shrink and your blood run thick.

Schopenhauer and Kant both despised smoking, Professor Saeki told me.

I rested my elbows on the bar counter and ordered a small enough portion of caffeine to not break any rules of etiquette. Though tobacco and alcohol had been thoroughly obliterated, I was glad that caffeine had somehow managed to hang on. Even so, there were a lot of people who frowned at you if you ordered a cup of coffee, signs of a slowly building wave of momentum against caffeine. It had gotten worse in the last decade.

I went to one corner of the café and found a seat—one of several red gelatinous mushrooms protruding from the white deck. The café was completely empty. There were hardly any passengers either. I asked one of the attendants whether this was typical of the flight, and he agreed that numbers were down today.

Because the world had changed.

People were staying in their homes, thinking. No longer could anyone say for sure they wouldn’t be dying anytime soon. Especially not the people who had witnessed the newscaster killing himself.

<list:item>

                <i: Do I believe the declaration?>
<i: Will I kill someone?>

                <i: Who should I kill?>

</list>

To each, his or her own level of internal conflict.

Distress, hesitation, resentment, raw emotion.

Should I not kill and die, or should I kill and live? That was the question.

I imagined darkness sweeping through the households of the world in a churning wave of bleak emotions. Most admedistrations had called immediate sessions to discuss the declaration, but hardly anyone had shown up. What was there to discuss?

Okay, everyone, I’d like to start today’s session.

Should we really kill others so that we can survive?

Should we use knives or blunt instruments?

No one here has a gun, do they?

I had a hard time imagining it. Yet if they didn’t deal with the matter head on, what was left but empty platitudes? Calm down, everyone is going to be okay—even when they knew they wouldn’t be. This wasn’t something you could discuss in public. This was a decision everyone had to make on their own. At this moment, everyone in the world was being tested.

Just thinking about it made me grit my teeth and start fiddling with my fingers. It was times like this you really needed some nicotine.

It had been several days now since I’d had a smoke, and I missed it. I couldn’t eat to compensate either, or I’d get fat, which would draw unwanted attention. Being fat was even worse than having bad skin. Deviations from standard physique really stood out when everyone was listening so attentively to their health consultant’s advice and following their perfectly designed lifestyle plans to the letter. The range of acceptable body types grew narrower every year.

Q: How long will this game go on?

A: We want to keep everyone playing until the body fat ratio of everyone in the world is plus or minus 1 percent of everyone else of their own gender. There are several ways to quit the game along the way, such as death, death, or our favorite, death.

Maybe the ones who had killed themselves just wanted out.

<recollection>

                 Heidrich and Himmler tried to eliminate obesity among the SS, Professor Saeki said. Himmler’s dream was that one day, all Germans would be vegetarians.

</recollection>

Maybe everyone wanted out of the game, but the atmosphere of conformity that society generated was too hard to break free of, and eventually, they gave up trying to quit. I had stayed in, myself, but in ways that didn’t require me to be serious about it at all. This meant that I had to spend most of my time on the fringes, tromping across battlefields.

<dictionary>

                <item>Baghdad</item>

<definition>

             Capital city of Iraq. Located in the middle of Iraq on the Mesopotamian plain. Baghdad is an old city, built during the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate and nearly destroyed in a wave of terrorist attacks against a U.S. occupying force stationed there following the second Gulf War at the beginning of this century. After the Maelstrom, Baghdad reinvented itself as a medical industry mecca. Tax breaks favoring medical investors and laws allowing the testing of experimental treatments on humans made the city an attractive place for medical industrial combines, medical think tanks, and research organizations, all who raced to establish their headquarters here, giving rise to the city’s nickname, “Medical Dubai.”

</definition>
</dictionary>

I looked through the passenger compartment and saw that, indeed, most people were somehow tied to the medical industry.

<list:item>

                <i: a researcher for a medical industrial collective>
<i: a top economist  for one of the medical think tanks>
<i: a software engineer manager for a medcare unit  maker>

</list>

Of course, when I thought about it, it was difficult to find someone in our modern society who didn’t have a connection to some sort of medical service. I was reminded that my Helix agent ID made me stand out like a sore thumb. Especially with me standing up here, doing caffeine.

I scrunched down into my gelatin seat and watched as the PassengerBird wheeled through the sky. The seat twisted beneath me, absorbing the extra Gs as we descended to the Baghdad landing deck.

≡

It didn’t take long for the first cracks to appear in the world’s facade.

<movie:ar:id-593-6586afv50-73649o-arin678>

                 While I was in the PassengerBird an Italian man hanged himself: Luigi Vercotti, a volunteer resource manager in the Weiland Admedistration.

                 Vercotti had a six-year-old son and a thirty-eight-year-old wife. He had made a loop in a necktie while his wife and child were out shopping, tied it to a rafter, and kicked the small crate he’d been standing on out from under his feet.

                 The weight of his entire body falls on his neck.

                 The carotid artery begins to scream under the pressure.

                 The brain ceases to function in less than ten seconds’ time.

                 Then, gradually, the heart. stops. beating.

</movie>

Inside his body, WatchMe was blaring with emergency messages for the medical server. Even when it was all over, the medicules would keep racing about until they ran out of energy from furiously signaling that there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen getting to the brain. Seen from the outside, death was a very gradual process of cell decomposition. It took time. Death didn’t happen in an instant.

Miach once showed me a picture scroll from the twelfth century or so called the “Nine Faces Poem.”

It consisted of nine illustrations showing a woman who had died. Her body gradually changed color, became bloated, then began to rot. The scroll ended with various birds and animals coming to eat her. The pictures were real, raw. It was hard to imagine the thing had been drawn so long ago. I had no idea how Miach had gotten her hands on such obviously emotionally traumatic material. Though I assumed she was capable of pretty much anything that was illegal.

“At the time when this was written, death was everywhere,” Miach said. “It takes time for a person to die, lots of time. When we go to someone’s great-grandfather’s or great-grandmother’s funeral these days, they have that case for melting and sterilizing the body. But back then, they put the body in a coffin and put the whole thing in the ground. You’ve probably never even seen a coffin, have you?

“Even when they processed the bodies, they didn’t take them to a reduction center to have them converted into harmless goop, they actually burned them. When they said ‘dust to dust,’ they really meant it.”

The idea that human death comes with brain death is a pretty recent one. From the time when people started thinking that we were our brains.

The moment I stepped off the bird in Baghdad, a call came in from the local Helix Agency office. I opened the message in my call box and I was in a real-time AR feed. There were reports from the Italian police in a document list and feeds with chatter about an incident that had happened thirty minutes prior. More was coming in: evidence, witness statements, etc.

“Is this the work of our mastermind or masterminds?” Someone in AR asked. Stauffenberg was there. She shook her head and indicated to all of us that we should read the suicide note posted in evidence.

“He left a note?” someone else said, surprised. No one had left anything in the earlier wave of suicides, with the possible exception of Cian Reikado.

The suicide note was a simple affair.

<list:item>

                <i: I do not think I am capable of killing another person.>
<i: I do not think I could bear the guilt I would feel even if I did manage to kill someone.>

                <i: Though my body is  a public body, the same goes for others around me.>

                <i: I will not let myself be killed by the evil people who claim to be doing  this.>

                <i: I apologize to my wife and son, and my neighbors, for choosing to kill myself instead.>

</list>

That was all.

“This is a new development. We do not think our mastermind was involved,” Stauffenberg said.

I had to agree. This wasn’t the doing of whoever had sent that memorycel to Network 24. This was someone who had taken that news report seriously and decided to take their own life before the “mastermind” could take it for him. It wasn’t an entirely outrageous decision.

Stauffenberg asked about media coverage and was informed that at present the only people other than the family who knew about the suicide were the local Italian police, Interpol, and the Helix Inspection Agency. Still, they would probably only be able to keep it under wraps for a few days at most. After that, the Werther effect would sweep the globe.

That was why they were giving the media a gag order, to keep would-be Werthers from popping up. Incidentally, the Werther effect refers to multiple linked suicides after a widely publicized one. Why did I know this mostly useless fact? Because Miach Mihie had told me.

<recollection>

                 “See this?” Miach held up a book. “The Sorrows of Young Werther. This book killed a lot of people. Impressive, isn’t it?”

                 How does a book kill people, I asked her. “You mean someone hit them with it?”

                 So Miach explained the travails of jungen Werther to me. Apparently, the titular character loves this girl, but the girl is engaged to marry another man. Unable to bear unrequited love, our hero kills himself.

                 “Sounds like a pretty typical romantic love tragedy,” I said. “What does that have to do with lots of people dying?”

                 “Get this—people who identified with Werther, because, say, they were in a similar position, were influenced by the story to kill themselves. Then people heard about that and they killed themselves. The first copycat suicides! And all after a completely fictional character, though no doubt inspired by the author Goethe’s own experiences.”

                 Miach Mihie flashed her customary smile and thrust the book out in front of her. “Isn’t it cool? Words, books, fiction all have the power to kill.”

</recollection>

Useless information, rotting at the bottom of the world.

I knew these things, thanks to Miach.

If word of the suicide and the accompanying note got out, it was a sure thing that plenty of other people would follow suit. I wondered how many would choose suicide before we reached the time limit, and how many people would do as they were told and kill at least one other person. It occurred to me that there would be a lot of people unable to kill themselves or another person who would simply try to wait it out.

Either way, it was clear we were headed for another Maelstrom.

“Couldn’t we take everyone’s WatchMe off-line and cut the links to the health supervision servers?” someone suggested, but it was an impractical idea. WatchMe was tied into the global ID system. If a person took their WatchMe off-line, they couldn’t buy things, get on the train, or even get into their own home. It would be mass chaos.

“The world will fall into chaos,” grumbled one of the other Helix agents in the AR session. Then the weary-faced agents all began to talk at once, their words describing a grand list of what we would lose.

“All the admedistrative functions: hitch-homing, morality sessions, mutual aid, elder care. All will cease.”

“Our social system is based on the open exchange of information and unlimited trust in others within the admedistration and regional collectives. What will happen to that?”

“And our economic cycle is based on the assumption that people will live long, healthy lives.”

“Things will grind to a halt.”

“What’s to keep people from killing each other? From killing us?”

“If things keep going this way—”

“We’ll be back to the beginning of the twenty-first century, no—”

“There will be no morality at all! Another Maelstrom!”

“They’ve activated some kind of process in the brain. The question is, what?”

“Clearly, what we’ve seen is the forced introduction of artifical intent. What I’d like to know is who is doing this?”

“According to Senior Inspector Tuan Kirie’s report, there already exists a paper describing in detail the structures in the brain that express human will. The paper is a study by Russian neurologist Sergey Gorlukovich Yelensky on the feedback system of the midbrain.” Prime was speaking. “This paper details how to very accurately model the human psyche control system and has already influenced some practicing therapists. I believe our agent has some solid evidence related to this paper that will help us get to the core of our current dilemma.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not true,” I said. “I’m merely in a position to contact someone who I believe may have the kind of information that will lead us back to those responsible.”

“Well, whatever the case, the fact that you’re ahead of us in this investigation remains unchanged.”

One of the other agents spoke up. “If they understand that much about human will, it’s possible they can in fact control it. Senior Inspector Kirie, shouldn’t you share any information you have with the rest of us?”

He spoke very gently. This was a discussion. No feathers were to be ruffled.

This was how it was done.

“At the present moment I have no solid information. The scraps I do have on hand would only needlessly confuse the investigation as a whole. I did not see the need to contact any other members of this agency.”

“I think that I should be the judge of what is solid and what is not,” Stauffenberg said, narrowing her eyes.

I gave a noncommittal nod and imagined how good it would feel to just give her the finger.

<recollection>

                 “That’s a symbol? What does it mean?” I asked, looking at Miach’s raised middle finger.

                 “It’s an ancient gesture. It means fuck you. That’s English, though the phrase isn’t even in use anymore, so it’s kind of hard to feel the impact it once had. Imagine all the worst things you could possibly say to someone to show how little you think of them. That’s fuck you.”

</recollection>

03

Gabrielle Étaín says: “We are a collection of desires, defined along a hyperbolic curve.”

Gabrielle Étaín says: “Even the pigeon and the monkey overestimate the value of that which is in front of them.”

Gabrielle Étaín says: “Even the pigeon and the monkey have a consciousness and a will. What makes our consciousnesses and our wills any more important?”

I was in my car, driving to meet Gabrielle Étaín.

The Tigris spread out to my right-hand side as I passed beneath an arch, massive and white like the rib bone of a dragon. The road sloped up toward the top level of the giant Dian Cécht medical industrial collective building that loomed like an ant mound over Baghdad, gradually giving me a better view of the landscape as I got closer. Eventually, I was high enough to look down on all of Baghdad. I sat back and let the Baghdad Central Traffic Guidance server lead me to Gabrielle Étaín’s lab.

The desert horizon shimmered in the heat.

The medical industrial collective zone in Baghdad lacked any of the advertising you saw in regular cities. In other words, the medical complex here was entirely self-sufficient. There was no need to sell AR advertising space. Looking at it, you could see how no one here needed the extra revenue. Still, for someone who had grown up with advertisements plastered on every visible surface, being in a place with none was somewhat disconcerting.

I saw a forest of pinkish evergreens and a lake. That would be the Dian Cécht park sector. I drove around the “naturally” modeled shore within the giant complex. The design group responsible for building the place had taken care to not make it feel like an anthill once you were inside the thing. The car took me up a gently curving slope to the floor above the lake. This was the uppermost level in the entire zone.

I stopped the car. The SEC Neuromedical Research Consortium offices thrust out like the bow of a boat, six hundred twenty meters up the side of the Dian Cécht. That would be the research and development sector, sitting out under the blazing sun. SEC was an acronym formed from the first letters of its founding admedistrations: Sukunabikona, Eugene, Crups.

I touched the door to give my ID and a receptionist came out to show me into the waiting room. The interior here reminded me of the PassengerBird: high ceilings and walls made of a white, plastic-like material, with red gelatin seats here and there, all unoccupied.

I sat down in one and waited until Gabrielle Étaín made her appearance. I heard her shoes squeak on the floor before I looked up. We shook hands, and she sat down with me on one of the red seats.

“When I heard a Helix agent was here to see me I thought it was a surprise inspection. Not that we are doing any research here to concern anyone at the WHO.”

She spoke softly and slowly, sitting with her back to a window that stretched the full length of the wall. The horizon behind her formed a straight line dividing sky from water. Several birds wheeled through the air.

“I’m sorry if I startled you. It was unintentional. I’m here to ask after a particular person and about certain neurological research. I have reason to believe you can help me on both points.”

“By all means.”

“First, the research. Are you familiar with a paper that lays out, in great detail, the feedback mechanisms in the midbrain?”

“Yelensky’s paper?”

“That’s the one,” I said, watching her face closely.

She moved her lips like she was rolling a candy around in her mouth, staring at me a moment before she said, “This is an inspection, then.”

I waved both hands in denial. “No, it’s not, really. All I’m asking for is information that we think can help with an ongoing investigation. Why do you think this is an inspection?”

“Because our neuromedical consortium is putting together a model of those very mechanisms you speak of.”

“Then, do you think you could explain the general gist of your research to me—just whatever’s been publicly announced.

I don’t mean to pry,” I said as gently as I could.

Étaín thought for several seconds before telling me that the consortium was researching the nature of value judgments within the human psyche.

“What sort of judgments?” I asked.

“Say, for instance, if I offered someone ten thousand credits now or a promise for twenty thousand credits a year from now, which would they choose?”

“The former, probably.”

“Indeed. And this is true not only of humans but also of primates such as chimpanzees, and birds such as pigeons and pheasants. Similar desire tendencies can be observed in other animals typically kept as pets, such as dogs and cats. This category of organisms overestimates the value of that which is right in front of it.”

“Is that something we evolved?”

“It’s part of our genetic programming. However, to find the same feature across so many varied species indicates that there is some reason this is a particularly easy feature for vertebrates to develop.”

“Well, isn’t it kind of obvious? If we don’t eat the thing sitting right in front of us, some other individual will come along and take it away. Individuals who sit around waiting for a future reward would die in such a world. Isn’t valuing the bird in hand just part of the survival of the fittest?”

“If you plot perceived value on a graph, with the horizontal axis as time and the present as zero, then you will see the line representing value curve sharply upward the closer it comes to the zero point, reaching its zenith as it hits the vertical axis. By comparison, value in the far future goes low quickly, changing hardly at all between a year and two years distant. A hyperbola. When humans and most living creatures consider the value of something, they tend to see its future value diminish hyperbolically.”

“In other words, our system of evaluation isn’t exponentially logical, it’s hyperbolically illogical.”

“Indeed. And because we possess a hyperbolic value system, we make illogical decisions and take precipitate actions. When a chance to profit presents itself clearly before our eyes, we erroneously believe its value to be much greater than it actually is. There is an ongoing survival game between the agents of short-term desire and long-term desire, and we call this game will. This is an important feature of the feedback mechanism that Yelensky’s model of human will does not consider—a model we are currently using our findings to perfect.”

I thought of my father. If you wanted to use the feedback mechanism to control human will, you would need a very detailed model of human value judgments in order to accurately predict how such control would function.

“Dr. Nuada Kirie wouldn’t be part of the project team, would he?”

“He is, that is, he was in the beginning. He is no longer with the consortium.”

“Was Dr. Kirie using this midbrain feedback web model for any other research?”

“Well…some of our researchers do take part in side projects, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t know about any of that.”

“How does knowing that the feedback web follows a hyperbolic curve change your view of human will compared to previous models?” I asked out of plain curiosity.

Étaín put a hand to her chin in thought for a moment. “Well, I suppose the revelation that human will is actually more of a battle royal between multiple desire agents within the brain has allowed us to prove that animals too possess a will.”

“In other words, animals aren’t just acting by their genetic programming or instinct?”

“Your language reveals a bias. What we call our ‘will’ or ‘soul’ is really just a collision between multiple genetically programmed elements. There is a test using pigeons where one button releases ten beans when it’s pressed and thirty beans when it’s pressed after waiting a certain amount of time. It turns out that there are pigeons who choose to wait for the thirty beans. Pigeons have the same range of choice allowed them by will under our model. In other words, the model allows us not only to understand human will but the very nature of consciousness, and put that knowledge to better use.”

“Such as?”

“Such as…pain,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“First, you have to understand the true nature of what I have been referring to as feedback. Any psychological effect that grabs the attention of the consciousness and leaves a strong impression is feedback. This is true under Yelensky’s model as well. The feedback need not be a reward or even anything beneficial.”

“All right. And?”

“The pain we feel the moment we prick our finger with a needle is nothing more than another agent trying to leave an impression and get selected. The hyperbolic time axis in this case is very short, making it easier for the pain to be chosen.”

I frowned. How could pain be chosen? “But you can’t accept or deny pain,” I said.

“Actually, you can. Surely you have heard stories of people who are so focused on some activity that they only realize their finger or arm has been cut off some seconds after the fact. This is because the pain competed with, yet failed to overcome, the hold that activity had on their consciousness.”

“I see.”

“That is why we understand pain to be a subjective experience. For a physical sensation, it is highly dependent on environmental factors to determine whether or not it is selected and to what degree. That is why there is no absolute scale to measure pain.”

“So all of the sensations that make up our reality are these agents who have been selected for advancement to the upper levels of the brain?”

“That’s one way to put it, yes. Even sight, sound, smell, and taste must be selected before they are permitted into the consciousness,” Étaín said. “Of course, these basic stimuli have steep hyperbolas, making it easy for them to make the final cut, so they are rarely entirely ignored.”

“Which means that, in a sense, your research isn’t just about our consciousness, but about how our very reality is constructed.”

Étaín raised an eyebrow and looked at me as though I had said something peculiar. “But reality and consciousness are the same thing, Inspector Kirie.”

“Are they?”

“The reality we can accept is limited to our consciousness, after all.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

Gabrielle Étaín stood and extended her hand. “I hope I have answered all of your questions to your satisfaction, Inspector Kirie. Now, if you don’t mind, I should get back to my work.”

I thanked her and shook her hand, saying that I might be back again. Just then, I became suddenly curious as to how this woman had taken the news of the declaration. I wondered what decision she would make.

I loved asking the uncomfortable questions.

“By the way, I was wondering whether you heard the declaration.”

“I did.”

“What did you think?”

It wasn’t a fair question. But I was hoping that its very vagueness might catch her by surprise and reveal something. Her response was disappointing.

“It’s quite horrible.”

I pressed the attack. “Don’t you think the technology you’re researching here treads similar ground to the mind-control suicides they threatened?”

Étaín’s finger went to her chin again. “I’d have to agree. But we are not criminals. We cannot control another’s will nor show them a different reality.”

“Have plans to do anything before the deadline?”

Uncomfortable question number two.

Étaín furrowed her brow at my lack of tact. “I will do nothing. It’s clear they’re just trying to scare us.”

“But they might actually have the technology to make people kill themselves. You saw what that newscaster did.”

“And I trust the various admedistration members will show us their public resolve. Our society will bow to no one.”

It was a pitch-perfect response. Perhaps too perfect.

Étaín showed me to the door in silence. As I walked through, a final question occurred to me. The drama of the moment was a bit forced, but sometimes that could be quite effective.

“One last thing, you don’t happen to know of any organization called the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group, do you?”

There was a brief moment of silence before Étaín’s calm reply.

“Never heard of them.”

04

The media was showing video of armed troops stationed in every major city in the world.

Streets lined with pink trees.

Pink paint to camouflage the rough edges of the city for its citizens.

Pink firearms.

Pink grenades.

Pink gas masks.

I had no doubt that the tear gas would be pink too.

The admedistrations had demanded every region in the world declare a state of emergency.

<list:item>

                <i: New York>
<i: Paris>
<i: Geneva>
<i: Tokyo>

</list>

Police and Geneva Convention forces stood at every corner.

Their orders were to watch for killers and potential suicides. The killers would probably be wearing pink. Of course, since the police officers and soldiers on patrol were all subject to the same one-man-one-kill declaration, who could trust them? Everyone was suspect, and armed people even more so.

From the moment of the declaration, the world had been walking backward through history. People saw the Maelstrom in every shadow.

The central district of Baghdad was completely abandoned. Everyone was huddled in their homes as if they could avoid having to make a decision. But the declaration had made its effectiveness clear, and everyone belonging to an admedistration who had WatchMe installed was at risk.

It was hard when you were forced to make a very personal decision in a society that stressed following advice and cooperative consensus.

<list:item>

                <i: Should I kill someone to live?>
<i: Should I kill no one and die?>

                <i: Should I choose not to believe what I saw with my own eyes?>

</list>

I had no doubt that the tech-heads were busily combing the admedistration servers, looking for holes in security. Holes in the WatchMe servers responsible for monitoring the medicules in several billion people’s bodies.

For my part, I had just used my privileges as a Helix agent to slip some eavesdropping medicules into Gabrielle Étaín when I shook her hand. The medicules went in through the skin, finding their way through her body, until they activated the eavesdropping circuit in her HeadPhone. Though there hadn’t been a single thing wrong with Étaín’s performance to make me suspect her, she was the only lead I had.

A call came in from business-card man as I drove down the deserted road.

“Did you meet with Gabrielle Étaín?” Vashlov asked. He sounded pleased with himself.

“Word travels fast.”

“The SEC Neuromedical Research Consortium is just one public front of the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group. Étaín is one of them, Inspector Kirie.”

“And you know this how?”

“We followed the money. I realize that’s a bit beyond the capabilities of a Helix agent.”

“Then why not bug Gabrielle Étaín instead of me?”

“Oh, we are. With little result. She knows she’s being watched.”

“Then why didn’t you stop me from going to see her? If I’d known she was involved—”

“Because we were hoping for a chemical reaction.”

<discomfort>

                 That was troubling. So the man from Interpol had used me, letting me meet with Étaín in hopes that the specter of an official agency investigation would elicit a reaction from the Next-Gen group. They had reached a dead end with their informants and surveillance, so they put their money on my being just the element of surprise they needed to tip the scales.

                 “Well, don’t I feel stupid.”

                 “You understand how critical the situation is. They might take defensive action. Take care of yourself.”

                 “Oh, I always do. There’s no shortage of terrorists who would like a Helix agent as a feather in their cap.”

</discomfort>

I ended the call to my HeadPhone and pulled in to the Baghdad Hotel.

Back when this had been a war zone, the American occupying forces had surrounded the place with four concrete walls to keep out the improvised explosive devices and the RPGs. In the middle of the explosions and the debris, the CIA had set up camp here. Though most surveillance of the terrorist sector these days was carried out by Geneva Convention forces and the military information suppliers they hired, at the time, the CIA was the largest information network run by any nation in the world.

That age had passed, and now the place was just a typical upscale hotel on Sadoon Street, where it passed through the Baghdad Medical Industrial Zone. Coming from Geneva forces camps on the front lines, I preferred less ostentatious places to stay, but there was a tradition of WHO and admedistration officials coming to the Baghdad Hotel, so I had little choice in the matter. I went through the lobby, passing by admedistration officers and WHO VIPs along the way. When I reached my room and pressed my finger to the door, it swung open. A single folded piece of paper fell to the floor.

<cautiously>

                 Reflexively, I switched off my AR. I didn’t want anyone who might be snooping on my visual feed to see what, if anything, was written on the note. Like I had been able to see those records of the suicidees, the police and Interpol and certain civilian MIS had the authority to snoop on visual feeds in real time. Just to be sure, I went into the bathroom and used removal liquid to wash the AR contacts out of my eyes. Then I shut the door and crawled under the bed. Interpol was using me. They could easily be monitoring my room. Curled up like a fetus in the dark, I opened the twice-folded paper.

                 ABŪ-NUWĀS. EVENING. NO AR, NO RIDERS.

                 I crawled out from beneath the bed and looked out the window.

                 The sky was slowly growing redder, getting ready for dusk. By riders they meant visual and audio bugs. Someone wanted me to see or hear something they didn’t want recorded by AR and sent to any servers.

</cautiously>

Evening was pretty soon.

In a movie Miach showed me once, someone who’d received a secret message had used a lighter to burn it in an ashtray. How convenient that must’ve been, I thought as I changed into my civilian clothes and shoved the paper into a pocket.

It was very rare to see an actual Iraqi within the area occupied by the medical industrial collective. It had been a strange chain of events that led to this Middle Eastern country becoming the world center for medicine. But like there was no place better than any other for making movies or manufacturing PassengerBirds, there was no best place for making medicine. Once a little bit of wealth had accumulated, it had taken off, transforming the desert into a giant industrial zone.

The fact that Iraq had, during the Maelstrom, suffered from nuclear fallout meant that there was no shortage of disease here for medical researchers to study. But in those days, it would have been hard to find a place that hadn’t been hit by nukes. Nor were the tax breaks and morally lax laws enough to explain the bizarre medical oasis that had sprung into existence here. The only explanation you could give was teleological: the wealth had accumulated here because of an accumulation of wealth.

Military resource suppliers took care of the security.

<list:company>

                <c: Security Arts Co.>
<c: Hard Shield Co.>

                <c: Eugene & Crups Co.>

                <c: etc., etc.>

</list>

The zone was completely reliant on military resource supplier security.

Though from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century nonstanding forces had still been the property of nations, as the nations weakened, the balance of military force shifted to MRSs and military information suppliers. On the surface, there was very little difference, though, seeing as how nearly all MRSs and military information suppliers were contracted by the Geneva Convention Organization, an international body formed by an accord between every admedistration. I stopped at a SecGate in the several kilometer–long wall surrounding the medical zone so a medical soldier in his pink uniform could check my identification. They also needed my acknowledgment that they could not guarantee my well-being outside the security zone, and that my WatchMe would go off-line.

I was free, once again in a world without WatchMe, medcare units, or AR. I looked around at scenery that time had forgotten: barracks after barracks after barracks, a tangle of crumbling buildings. The place had a feel to it that was completely missing from any admedistration city, and the air was filled with scents and smells.

A man sat on the street smoking tobacco out of a giant pipe that looked more like a strange musical instrument. There was the smell of fish cooking, meats, and all kinds of spices. This was a market. I went into a nearby restaurant and ordered a meal of uncertain composition, calories, and risk vectors. I noticed an ashtray on the table, so I motioned to the owner that I wanted to smoke. He produced some cigarettes and a lighter. I took the memo I had stuck in my pocket, held it over the ashtray, and set it on fire. Cool. I’d always wanted to do that.

<relax>

                 This was life outside the admedistration. This was living.

                 It pleased me that even with the world medical headquarters looming over them, most people in lower Baghdad hadn’t installed WatchMe. They weren’t connected to any server. They just

<list>

                <i: caught colds.>
<i: got headaches.>

                <i: got cancer.>

                <i: died around the age of sixty or seventy.>

</list>

                 I puffed on the cigarette, my first since Niger. Living here wouldn’t be so bad, though I had my doubts as to how long the admedistrations would leave these people to their own devices.

                 Pretty soon my fish came out. It looked like a carp that had been caught in the nearby Tigris, sliced open and grilled. It came with a ball of some kind of bread and uncooked dates.

<list>

                <i: no calorie count>
<i: no list of ingredients>
<i: no risk assessment>

</list>

                 My simple dish, with no AR readout floating over it, was beautiful in its simplicity.

                 “That looks great,” I said under my breath. Uncooked dates had been a rare delicacy for the desert people here, and maybe still were. Thus dates’ status as symbols of beauty and victory in the Bible. I had heard that the Tree of Life in the Christian tradition was sometimes thought to have been a date palm. When he came into Jerusalem, the people of the city had waved date fronds to bless Jesus. This fruit was life, and faith.

                 I knew this not because Miach had ever told me, but because of the date palm pictured in the symbol of the Helix Inspection Agency. Any Christian overtones in that were nullified by the fact that the date palm had appeared as a symbol of life in the Koran and even in the tale of Gilgamesh—another local favorite in its day.

                 There were lots of people out in the street, the polar opposite of the state of affairs in the post-declaration admedistrative society I’d just left. I doubted many of the folks here had even heard the news. Only the billions of people with WatchMe installed had reason to be scared shitless. The residents of the lifeist block, responsible for 80 percent of the global economy. For the Iraqis on this twilight street, WatchMe and medicules had nothing to do with their lives.

                 Life on the outside, life on the inside.

                 The difference between the two couldn’t be greater.

                 On one side, people cut up their bodies and entrusted the parts to different service providers in order to fulfill the functions demanded of them by society. On the other, these people weren’t letting anyone touch their bodies.

                 As I busied myself with the river fish—the dish was called masgouf, I learned—the proprietor brought a bowl of watery yogurt. This I decided was less a dessert and more another course in the meal. He set it down on the pitted surface of my wooden table and retreated into the back.

</relax>

As he left, I noticed another piece of paper sticking out from beneath the yogurt bowl. I opened it. It said “To the river” in Japanese.

I motioned for the lighter again and burned the second piece of paper over my ashtray. Finished with the masgouf, I went out onto the street, weaving my way through the crowd in hopes of losing the tail my mystery correspondent doubtlessly feared.

This street had once been an entertainment district: Abū-Nuwās.

The name referred to this street, the one with the market. Abū-Nuwās had been a great Arab poet and a lover of wine and carnal pleasures in an Islamic society that forbade alcohol. His hedonistic poems took the list of things forbidden by Islam and threw it out the window—social shock poetry. In other words, two thousand years ago, a man had lived here who fought against the same kind of dogma that lifeist society espoused today. It was the perfect setting for a secret rendezvous between a spineless conformist to the system and someone who very likely had a hand in controlling the system.

I made a careful scan for tails, then left Abū-Nuwās for the banks of the river, glowing in the evening sun. The riverbank was open sand all the way down to the water. I wondered if it would be Gabrielle Étaín waiting for me, or even Miach Mihie herself. The light reflected off the Tigris, playing tricks with the eyes and hiding the face of the person I now saw standing a short distance away from me, closer to the river.

“You know why they call this place Mesopotamia?” the figure on the bank asked in a familiar voice. “Mesopotamia means ‘between the rivers.’ You understand?”

“Because we’re between the Tigris and Euphrates?”

“Precisely.”

The man stepped closer. He was wearing a tattered suit. A hobo suit. Fitting for the man who had left my mother and me thirteen years ago to come to Baghdad.

05

“I’m surprised you came all this way.”

It was my father. The genuine article. Though his face bore the wear and tear of thirty years, it was still the same face as the man who had been defeated in that session by the caffeinehating woman, and the man who had left me and my mother after Miach died.

It hadn’t been easy getting here.

A lot of people died.

I told him that.

“I’ve heard. The whole world has it pretty bad right now.

It’s a shame.”

“A shame? But didn’t you tell Miach to kill them?”

“Not true,” my father said, his back to the setting Baghdad sun.

“Have you been here this whole time? Thirteen years?”

He shook his head slowly. “I left on occasion. With an ID from my current organization I can go most places in the world without revealing who I am.”

“Organization? Which organization might that be?”

“The only organization truly capable of controlling the world—the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group. All the resources and medical planning take place here in the Dian Cécht complex.”

“What exactly do you mean by control the world?”

My father began to walk slowly down the riverbank. I walked alongside him, listening carefully to every word.

“You’ve heard something from Saeki, yes? Or Étaín?”

“I’ve learned that human will is the state of struggle between various agents in a feedback web located in the midbrain. And I’ve learned that the hyperbola traced by that feedback influences our decisions.”

“That’s basically true, yes.”

The sun had set and the temperature began dropping. It made the midday heat seem like a dream. I rubbed my hands together against the slight chill, glad I had thought to wear a jacket.

“And you’re doing research into this?”

“No. The research is pretty much completed.”

I hesitated. If the research were completed, then what was the Next-Gen group doing now? What was my father working on?

“Our organization’s goal is to be prepared. We prepare for the possible coming collapse. We keep our technology safe, secret, and ready to deploy should the need ever arise. Of course, we would prefer that time never come, but Miach’s group sees things somewhat differently.”

“Explain.”

“Hmm. Well, you seem to have already grasped the workings of the feedback mechanism and how it generates what we call will.”

“Professor Saeki said it was like a conference.”

“An analogy we often use. One important thing to understand, however, is the reflexive nature of the system. Based on the outcome of this ‘conference,’ the feedback mechanism is exposed to endless change and adjustment. The results influence our feedback system, and the feedback system generates more results in a loop. If we make a decision, that bias will increase in a cyclical fashion. The chaos in the system multiplies. This is why human will is illogical, never static, and very hard to predict. You follow?”

“I think so.”

“In controlling the feedback web in the midbrain with medicules, we found we were able to influence human decisions, emotions, and thoughts. This all happened shortly before you were born. At that time, the control of human will was a hot topic with upper leadership at WHO and some of the admedistrations.”

That would be the frightened old men.

Frightened of chaos.

Frightened of people losing their rational minds.

Frightened of riots leading to genocide leading to nukes going off all over our planet.

“The Maelstrom,” I said, half to myself.

My father nodded. “At the time, the idea was to create a safety net to prevent mankind from ever sliding back into the disorder of those days. They called on us to do something about it. They thought we could find a way to save us from our own barbarous selves. Thus the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group was born.”

The group was no mere research organization, my father explained. In a way, it had more power than the United Nations, more power even than WHO. These powerful, frightened old men and women who were part of WHO and the United Nations and the admedistrations were also part of the Next-Gen group.

“We had all the funding we needed, and research progressed swiftly. It wasn’t long before we had medicules in past the bloodbrain barrier,” he said.

“What?”

“No one is comfortable with the idea of people messing with their brains. The idea that the brain is protected from medicules is a misunderstanding we spread quite deliberately. If you looked through all the literature on medicule technology, I’m sure you would find enough pieces to put it together yourself. This is publicly available information too. We just altered the flow of data and buried those papers in a pile of other research, where they would never draw unwanted attention. The problem wasn’t the blood-brain barrier to begin with. All we had to do to get past that was dress our medicules up to look like the oxygen and protein that were already passing through the barrier, and we were through in no time at all. The problem, Tuan, was with the very direction of our research.”

I wondered what he meant. “Personally, I see a big problem with the whole idea of controlling peoples’ wills in the first place,” I told him.

“I imagined you’d say that. But think about it a little. People let medicules control their bodies every day to suppress disease. Why then shouldn’t we suppress potentially harmful thoughts in the brain?”

<confusion>

                 I was about to say the words “free will,” but I hesitated.

                 Humanity had always gone out of its way to suppress nature.

                 We built cities, built societies, built systems.

                 All of these revealed an overriding human desire to take the unpredictable elements of nature and place them within a predictable, controllable framework. In order to live through an age of nuclear fallout and plagues, we had striven to conquer the last remaining vestiges of nature within us, and had largely succeeded. We installed medicules in our bodies and linked up to health supervision servers. We thoroughly rid our society of lifestyle habits that were bad for our health. Our victory was complete, with the exception of old age, of course.

                 Wasn’t the brain also part of the body? What possible reason could there be not to control it as well? I lost my conviction and sat down on the sandy riverbank. My gaze wandered off down the river. In the distance, I saw several young boys playing with a dog.

                 If that dog had a will of its own, then how could we say our souls are any more valuable than the soul of that dog?

</confusion>

“To our elders who lived through the Maelstrom, human will was nothing more than our barbaric nature, red in tooth and claw. Admedistrative society calls on its constituents to always remember public virtue and resource awareness. To follow its regulations and ‘atmosphere’ of their own free will. That is how we have been able to create the least lethal, most equal, most peaceful, and most love-filled society since the dawn of time.”

The smells of the market floated down from the street to the Tigris banks.

<list:meal>

                <m: the sliced-open, grilled fish I just
ate—masgouf>
<m: the chicken breast teshreeb>
<m: the roasted lamb quzi>
<m: the skewered mutton kebab>

</list>

Smells we had excised from our society.

The kind of society my father was talking about was the society Miach hated. To her, the heights mankind had reached, this temple to peace, thoughtfulness, and health, was just another prison to be shut down and abandoned.

What a picture our society painted: everybody binding themselves to unwritten rules, carefully staying inside unseen boundaries.

I don’t give a shit about love.

Or a damn about thoughtfulness.

And resource awareness can go fuck itself.

My body isn’t here for the admedistration. It’s not here for any of you. It’s only here for me.

These tits, this ass, these belong to Miach Mihie.

Miach put my feelings into words perfectly. Or maybe my feelings changed to fit her words. Whichever it was, a part of me buried deep down still felt that way.

All I had done by getting my job as a Helix agent, besides finding a place where I could relax and smoke a cigarette in the gray zone between barbarism and morality known as the battlefield, was create a weak partition between myself and society. I had to get close to the battles to escape the suffocation of society, but I never took it all the way. I wasn’t about to strap on a rifle and join in the battles myself.

I had merely found a comfortable spot somewhere between Miach and society.

Even without the mass simultaneous suicides, admedistration reports showed the suicide rate among youngsters going up year after year. More kids were

<list:action>

                <a: cutting their wrists.>
<a: hanging themselves.>

                <a: jumping off buildings.>

</list>

Souls in danger of being crushed by society were, in turn, gnawing away at its underbelly.

Souls that just didn’t fit. Souls of children yearning for disease, for damage, for pain. With wickedness in their hearts they tried to ruin their own precious lives, and they knew what they were doing. Something had to be wrong with this picture. Even in our brainwashed society, I think people had begun to realize it, but not with such clarity that they felt they could talk about the wrongness yet. It was just a slight feeling of discomfort, which they pushed down into their subconscious with all their might.

What I had found was middle ground between chaos and regulation, a limbo where I could hang for eternity.

I had sometimes felt like I was Miach’s doppelgänger.

But that wasn’t true at all. I had merely become the person I imagined Miach would have become if she had to live in my world.

“The reason I took Miach was, for one, because she was a perfect confluence of the various stressors our society creates. If we could bend Miach’s obdurate will and steer it off its collision course with death, then we could control anybody. That was the thought. In those days, we picked up a lot of kids like her and put them into treatment. We gathered the ones that wanted to kill themselves—especially the ones who overate or refused to eat, the ones who wanted to watch themselves grow weak and die. Our goal was to create a harmonized will inside the human brain. We called it the Harmony program. The experiments we performed on kids like Miach were tests-to-destruction, of a sort. We were seeing how far Harmony could go.”

I felt an irrational anger swelling up inside me. But not because of the tests they performed on Miach.

I wanted to know why they hadn’t tested me.

Of course, I knew precisely why. They needed someone who was really, deeply, fundamentally without hope. They probably had their eyes on hundreds of emergency morality centers. There were plenty of kids back then who had attempted suicide more than once, just as there were plenty of them now.

With Miach, my father had found his rock bottom.

He had seen the despair in her eyes.

He saw that she was, as Cian had said, standing on the edge of a cliff.

That was what my father had to control, or at least attempt to control.

<anger>

                 That was the reason he had abandoned me and my mother and come here to Baghdad. I had to accept that. Yes, I was feeling jealous. Children always got upset when they weren’t chosen for something. Still, at the same time, what they had done was beyond grotesque.

                 Despairing kids by the dozen.

</anger>

“How could you?”

My father nodded grimly. “It wasn’t easy. But if we didn’t do something, those children were a grave danger to themselves. All of them had repeatedly tried to take their own lives, and one day, they very well might have succeeded.”

“Nice try, but you’re just taking a consequence and calling it an objective.”

“True enough. Nor were our results by any means perfect.”

“What do you mean?”

“Harmony had a very serious side effect we didn’t anticipate— though, in hindsight, some simple logical reasoning should have made it obvious. As it was, we never saw it coming.”

Suddenly, it occurred to me what he was going to say.

He was right. Logically speaking, it was obvious. If the feedback web reached perfect harmony and all decisions could be made without any conflict and all actions taken clearly, what would that mean? It would mean nothing less than “I” was on the line.

“You killed consciousness.”

06

The death of consciousness.

My father’s eyes opened wide. For moment, he seemed at a loss for words.

“That’s right. How did you know?”

“Because I’ve heard from three people now what consciousness really is.”

The answer came out so smoothly it surprised even myself.

“That’s right, the conference. If all the participants have the same opinion, and all of their roles are perfectly aligned, then why hold a conference at all? If the feedback web does not plot our values on a hyperbola, but instead uses a logical, exponential curve, this is perfect harmony, in other words a state without any consciousness. It was something we couldn’t detect in our tests on animals.”

So my father had been trying to create a self-evident person, perfectly adapted to the stresses of admedistrative society. For someone whose every desire was self-evident, there was no need to make decisions. If their feedback web worked on clear, logical values, no will was needed to choose between one thing or the other. Consciousness was no longer required.

It almost made me laugh to think that such an obvious outcome hadn’t occurred to anyone in my father’s research group.

The mingled smells of spices and things cooking floated down toward the river from the direction of Abū-Nuwās. I spotted the boys again with their dog, running in and out of the water.

“We announced our findings to the other researchers and investors in the working group, that perfect harmony invariably meant the absence of consciousness. That consciousness was indeed only a mechanism for choosing between the various agents of desire teeming in our subconscious, the result of conflicts that required conscious thought to resolve, and the acting upon those conflicts. These choices were obvious to a perfectly harmonious will, thereby removing the need for a will to determine actions. We were chasing after the perfect human but ended up killing consciousness, for it was no longer needed.”

It was ironic. Our souls were nothing more than the product of a hyperbolic evaluation system we had developed over the course of our evolution. Perfect humans didn’t need souls.

“What happens when you lose your consciousness? Do you just sit there all day in your chair, drooling?”

“Nothing of the sort. You go shopping, you eat, you enjoy entertainment—you merely no longer have to make decisions what to do at any given time because everything is self-evident. It’s the difference between having to make choices and having it all be obvious to you. That’s all it is. That’s what divides the world of the consciousness and the world without. People have absolutely no problem living without consciousness or will, Tuan. They live their lives as normal. People can be born, grow old, and die without consciousness. Consciousness has very little to do with culture, really. From the outside, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether someone has a consciousness or is merely acting as though they did. However, because their system of values is fashioned to be in perfect harmony with society, there are far fewer suicides, and the kinds of stress we find in our admedistrative society disappear completely.”

So Miach and presumably these other kids had experienced this in the tests. They had experienced being without a consciousness.

All the billions of people on this earth had, at some point in their ancestry, along the long path of evolution, obtained what we call a consciousness. Evolution was a very haphazard thing. Only the genes well suited to a particular environment survived. The result of these patched-together adaptations was the species of human as we knew it now, each one of us possessing that curious byproduct of evolution we called a consciousness.

“When she came back, Miach said it had been pure ecstasy,” my father said with a wry chuckle. “While she was without consciousness, she ate normally, studied, spoke with us, and lived life as normal. When we brought her consciousness back, Miach didn’t remember a thing about her time during the test. She only had the sensation that she had been in a wonderful, joyous place.”

That made sense to me. You couldn’t look at dogs and not think they were, generally speaking, much happier than people. Someone once said that the bird that freezes upon the branch never knows suffering. What Miach had experienced was the state of mankind long before we had obtained consciousness, long before we got lost in the labyrinthine world of introspection and reflection.

The sun was sinking below the horizon now. I reached out as if to touch it with my fingers. People with perfect judgment do not require a consciousness, so it does not exist.

“And you tried to do this to everyone in the world? You were going to steal consciousness from everyone who was stupid enough to install WatchMe?”

“No—we weren’t,” my father said, beginning to walk back up the bank in the direction of the street. “We could not just make the decision to eliminate consciousness. For one, I was terrified of the thought. To lose who I am, my own consciousness…In a sense, it’s like dying. We didn’t have the right to decide whether or not to impose something like that on billions of people.”

“I suppose it depends on what death is,” I said.

I admit that I shared an inclination to think of my self as my consciousness. The consciousness had the ability to make predictions and to control and order the body and mind, and it was easy to think of that as being everything. Though I was sure my body saw things differently.

We were back in the heat of the crowd up on the main street. Lights had gone on, bare bulbs illuminating the open shop fronts. It wasn’t just restaurants—there were places selling cooking wares and fabrics and carpets. People of different occupations bustled about in the midst of mingled smells from the many stoves and grills.

“We asked WHO and a few of the admedistrations to make a decision,” my father was saying. “In the end, we settled on a compromise, that we would install the system in everyone, but not activate it. That’s right, the medicule network necessary to control our feedback web is already in place in your brain, as it is in mine. If ever mankind should threaten to sink back into the chaos that was the Maelstrom, then, as an emergency measure, we can activate Harmony.”

<anger>

                 Praise be to God. Though none of us asked, we have received. An automatic hallelujah device in our brains. Stuck right onto the synapses of our midbrain, never to let go or be removed. I could hear the choir singing now.

<music:name=Messiah:id=2y6r58jnjhu7451110eo99>

                <Hallelujah!>
<Hallelujah!>

                <Hallelujah!>

                <Hallelujah!>

                <Hallelujah!>

</music>

                 Ever since God had given us our self-awareness, it had done nothing but torment the suicidal and the literary among us, and now we were free to throw it all away. Free to return in primal ecstasy to the Kingdom of Heaven.

                 Hallelujah.

</anger>

“So you gave someone the power of life and death over our consciousnesses and stole Miach’s consciousness away from her? You’re worse than I thought.”

“I thought you’d say something of the sort—though admittedly, I never expected to hear that from the despairing little girl you used to be. I’m sure most people wouldn’t want to lose that part of their brain that recognizes ‘me’ as ‘me.’ No matter what the potential cost to society. Which is why the old folks in our group, in their fear of the chaos that was the Maelstrom, put their plan into action without any public discussion or any morality session review.”

If these old folks wanted it, the human race could have its consciousness taken away.

We could all become people free of our useless consciousness, all doing precisely what we should be doing at all times.

We could upgrade to the newer model. Homo perfectus.

“So if you wanted to—”

“Yes, but right now, we do not. No matter how big a mountain of suicides our gentle society creates, there has to be a societal solution for this. Because we believe this, our fingers have never once strayed toward the Harmony button. Believe me, we don’t want this to happen.”

“But Miach Mihie does?”

My father stopped and picked up a kettle from a stand out in front of one of the shops. He stared at it. “Tuan. Have you ever heard of the island of sign language?”

I blinked and said that I hadn’t. “That’s kind of a sudden change of topic, don’t you think?”

“The people who first colonized Martha’s Vineyard—that’s an island off the American coast—were cut off for some time from the mainland, and there was a lot of inbreeding. This resulted in several families where both parents had a recessive gene for deafness, and in another generation or two, hardly anyone on the island could hear at all. It was more unusual to have your hearing than not. So, everyone on the island communicated via sign language. Sign language became their mother tongue. And no one was the worse for it. There, a person with hearing—which we take to be the norm—was instead a radical departure from the norm. Their culture did not require a sense of sound.”

“I’m still not sure what this has to do with our conversation.”

“It has to do with Miach Mihie.”

“Don’t tell me that she was deaf—or wait, that she had some sort of consciousness impairment, like those people had a hearing impairment?”

“No, she had a consciousness. However, it was different from ours in that she had formed her consciousness sometime after her birth.”

<shaken>

                 After her birth?

                 “You mean, she was born without a consciousness?”

                 “That’s correct.” My father tapped the kettle he held with one fingernail. Ding. The clear, high tone echoed in my skull. “Several decades ago, in the midst of the conflict between Russia and Chechnya, a minority ethnic group was discovered. This was a completely new group as far as the scientific community was concerned, mind you, not appearing in any records until then. Though their clothing, food, culture, and language had all been influenced by the surrounding peoples, they avoided close relations with any of them, maintaining a small community in a rugged mountainous region, where they had been inbreeding for many generations.”

                 “Wait, Dad, are you saying—”

                 “I’m saying that these people shared a common recessive trait. It’s a trait that shows up very rarely in the general population, and the chances of two people with it marrying are so slim that there has never been any observations made of this occurring. The trait of which I speak is a missing gene—the gene responsible for consciousness. I’m sure that of the billions of people in the world, there are a few born without the ability to form a consciousness, but in this Chechen minority group, nearly everyone lacked a consciousness.”

                 “But then how did they live or develop a culture?”

                 “After we found them, we ran them through several tests. They were extremely adept at logical thinking. Their value system was not like our irrational hyperbola, which attributes too much value to that which is right before us. They did not make choices. MRI scans showed that, indeed, there was none of the activity we associate with consciousness going on, yet they lived regular lives and had their own culture—though much of it was borrowed from surrounding peoples as the need arose. They were a people that neither possessed nor required consciousness. Just like the people of Martha’s Vineyard didn’t require speech. They were people in perfect harmony with a perfectly logical value system.”

                 “So Miach…”

                 “The conflict had spread into the mountains, plunging her people into chaos. Miach was taken from her village at the age of eight by Russian soldiers and sent to a camp run by human traffickers. This was a place of unspeakable tragedy, where sex slaves were kept for the sole use of the Russian army. This is where her consciousness awoke. Her brain needed a consciousness with a hyperbolic value system in order to withstand the daily, immediate terror of repeated rape. What happened was, a region in her cerebrum began to emulate the functions of the feedback mechanism usually handled by the midbrain. You’ve heard stories of how brains damaged in accidents will activate undamaged regions to take over some of the lost functionality, right? The brain is a very flexible organ.”

                 Miach’s consciousness was an emulation?

                 Not a true consciousness like our own.

                 Not a pattern woven by the feedback web in the midbrain.

                 A replica, created to serve a dire need.

                 Imitation consciousness.

                 I stared at my father’s back. He hadn’t brought Miach to Baghdad just because her despair had been deeper and more violent than mine.

                 He had brought her here because of her lineage.

                 So she had been dragged from hell to start a new life in Japan, but for Miach, that wasn’t harmony either. Japan’s society, in its attempt to attain a kind of harmony, let itself be ruled by a strangling, enforced kindness that had produced a mountain of suicides.

                 Miach Mihie hated admedistrative society as much as she had hated Chechnya.

                 For Miach, Chechnya and Tokyo were just two different neighborhoods in the same hell.

</shaken>

Had Miach wanted to take us with her into death because she saw harmony on the other side?

“There are always monsters who find sexual attraction in children. These pedophiles among the Russian soldiers forced her to develop a consciousness out of hate, or rather something like a consciousness, and her newfound simulated consciousness despaired and chose death. I found it profoundly moving, and discouraging, that the decision to end one’s own life is a highlevel, conscious act, that only one with a conflicted consciousness can make.”

Dong! Just then, the kettle my father was holding flew out of his hands.

It shot across the shop, barely missing the half-dozing shopkeeper before crashing into a pile of pots and pans.

I whirled around and spotted a man hiding beneath a large hat. He was about ten feet away, smoke still rising from the barrel of his gun. Vashlov. The gun was pointed toward us.

“Interpol,” he said, reaching in with his free hand to pull a business card from his breast pocket. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Dr. Nuada Kirie. I’m also pleased to inform you that you’re under arrest for the mass coercion of suicides.”

<tension>

                 I took a step back, my hand reaching for the gun beneath my jacket.

                 “Whoa there, Tuan. You don’t move either. You’re related to the accused, after all.”

                 “Liar,” I said.

                 “No really, you are related to him. Or did you mean something else?”

                 I spat on the ground. “You’re not Interpol.”

                 “Oh, but I am. Look, it’s written on my card.” He waved his card in the air. Seeing the lack of reaction on our faces, he frowned. “Aw. And I thought my cards would be a big hit, what with AR off-line here.”

                 “You may have Interpol ID, but you’re working for Miach’s group, against my father. You’ve been at the center of this madness all along.”

                 “An intriguing deduction.”

                 I took another half step back, further into the shop. “You figured that by putting me into play you could get my father out in the open, away from the protection of the Next-Gen group.”

                 “Fascinating. And what was I going to do then?” Vashlov grinned, clearly enjoying himself. My right hand moved toward the holster again, and his gun jerked up to point straight at me. “I really wouldn’t do that, Miss. It’s not necessary. I’m only here to take Dr. Kirie into my custody.”

                 “I don’t suppose taking him back to Geneva is part of the plan.”

                 “Probably not. I am, as you say, with Miach Mihie.”

                 “What do you want?”

                 “Your father is the leader of the main faction within our group, you see.” The barrel drifted over to point at my father. “If I take him in, they’ll lose their focus—it will weaken them. The next day or two are of vital importance, you see. If I can keep him out of action just a little while, the balance of things will shift in a favorable direction.”

                 “And what direction might that be?”

                 “Well, we—”

                 While Vashlov was talking—a bit too involved with what he was saying—I had reached behind me with my left hand until I found a smallish metal object with a handle. Now I threw it at him as hard as I could. The pot smacked Vashlov’s forehead with a dull thonk and he lost his footing, falling over backwards. I almost laughed out loud at the unexpected efficacy of my attack.

</tension>

“Dad! This way!” I pulled my father’s hand toward the night street, hoping to lose ourselves in the crowd.

“Stop right there, Kiries! Both of you!”

We had made it about thirty feet by the time Vashlov got to his feet, blood trickling from a gash in his forehead. Not that thirty feet is very far to travel when you’re a bullet. If there weren’t people on the road between us, we would have been dead already.

“Stay close to me,” I told my father.

He nodded. “We have to do something—”

I pulled him by the hand again, pushing our way farther through the crowd. Our progress was made more difficult by the fact that I had no idea where we were going. If I had my AR on, and it was linked up to StreetWatch, I would know where every side street led to before we got to it. Running in an unfamiliar place in an unfamiliar land without AR was like running a race blindfolded.

“I said stop!” I heard Vashlov shouting behind us.

Sorry, pal.

We ran ahead, dodging a cart filled with fish for making masgouf. This place was chaos, filled with the smells of nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon, cumin seeds, perfume, and the bodily odors and bad breath of people without the benefit of WatchMe. Most of the men here were construction laborers who commuted into the medical industrial complex sector to work on the next giant building site. I looked behind me as we ran, but without AR, I had no idea where Vashlov might be hiding in the crowd.

“Sorry!”

We’d reached the restaurant where I’d eaten earlier that evening. I turned, pulling my father along behind me. Ignoring the accented complaint of the proprietor we ran through the shop, kicking through two sets of doors until we were outside again in an alleyway behind the restaurant.

Vashlov was standing no more than ten feet away from us, off to one side, facing right toward us.

<tension>
<silence>

                 In a moment of frozen time, Vashlov and I lifted our guns to point at one another.

                 Two shots were fired.

                 One from my gun.

                 One from Vashlov’s.

                 Both of them hit their targets.

</silence>
</tension>

Target No. 1: Vashlov’s chest.

Target No. 2: My father’s chest.

“Dad!”

<mourning>

                 My father had stepped out in front of me, between me and the barrel of Vashlov’s gun. As if he were trying to make up for thirteen years of lost parenting with a single act. And now he was dead. I put my hand to his neck but couldn’t get a warm pulse anywhere.

                 I had no tears. Inhuman, you think?

                 It was like the thirteen years had erased the father from my father. My sadness was a far gentler, quieter thing than what I had felt at Cian’s death or even at the first “death,” which had been Miach’s. In thirteen years, my father had become a stranger, with nothing to identify him to me, save the unseen, encoded ties of blood between us.

                 But it hadn’t been that way for him, had it. He had abandoned me and gone off with Miach to his own medical mecca. Yet he had still loved his daughter, even as I felt hardly anything for him at all. Perhaps his stepping in front of me had not been a conscious act but a reflexive one encoded in his DNA. Maybe that was the love I lacked—the love for one’s family.

                 My father had died for me, so now the only way I could repay him was with gratitude.

                 “Thank you.”

</mourning>

I reached down and smoothed my father’s half-opened eyelids shut, then stood, listening to the wheezing sound coming from Vashlov’s windpipe. He would be joining my father soon, but if he were still alive, I had plenty of things I wanted to ask him first.

“My father is dead. I hope you’re happy.”

“Works for me,” he said quietly. “I was hoping to abduct— but death is a big win too. Thanks to you sniffing around we managed to drag him out. Finally got Nuada…They’ll have a hard time putting things together now. Very hard. General chaos will take care of the rest.”

“What is it that you want?”

“What do we want? To build a new, post-chaos world. To bring an enduring harmony…”

There was something very disturbing about a group claiming they wanted peace when they had just plunged the world into darkness with a wave of suicides, and then, in the greatest act of terror in history, demanded the survivors kill each other.

“I don’t see a whole lot of harmony out there right now.”

“Things will settle down, as they must. This chaos is merely a step on the path toward peace. Miach Mihie has shown us the way. She is our prophet. She has a vision for mankind…the right path for us to take. You know her from when you were a child. You know that she can see what is yet to come.”

“So she had to make six thousand people try to kill themselves for this future?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not very convincing.” I grabbed him by the collar. “Where’s Miach?”

I could see blood seeping from Vashlov’s chest with every breath. He had lost a lot already. I must’ve hit a big artery or vein in there. Some of it was getting into his lungs, making it hard for him to breathe. His voice was a whisper, forced out through something that sounded just like I imagined a death rattle would sound.

“The suicides and the threats are just…the catalyst. Things are already in motion. But if you must know, Miach told me I could tell you where she was—but you have to promise to shoot me in the head if I tell you.”

Vashlov’s lips thinned and he formed a warped smile. For a moment, I hesitated.

A pleading look came into his eyes. “This really hurts. It hurts. Th-this is what pain feels like. WatchMe and medcare, you bastards, you sure did a fine job of keeping me in the dark about this sensation. Doesn’t that piss you off, Miss Kirie? Please…”

“Fine. Deal.”

I put the barrel of my gun to Vashlov’s forehead and pulled back the hammer. It clicked into place with a satisfying metallic sound and Vashlov breathed out with relief.

“Chechnya. Check with the Anti-Russian Freedom Front in Chechnya.”

“What, Miach is there?”

“You’ll just have to go see for yourself.”

Vashlov nodded to signal he was ready.

Something about the way his eyes looked through me made my finger pause, motionless, on the trigger. Here, beneath the rapidly darkening Iraq sky, I was about to kill someone for the first time in my life. Right here, in this very moment. I was making the same decision that had been forced on billions of people across the world.

This would free me from having to make that choice in a few days, I realized. It felt like cheating. The guy was begging me to do it, and I would even be avenging my father’s death. You couldn’t make up a better rationale than that. I steadied my grip on the gun and felt intense self-loathing.

A thought occurred to me. Why had my brain developed this function it was expressing now? In what environment would self-loathing give me an evolutionary advantage?

I pulled the trigger.

</body>
</etml>