Harmony

by Project Itoh

  HARMONY

  PROJECT ITOH

  Harmony

  © 2008 Project Itoh

  Originally published in Japan by Hayakawa Publishing Inc.

  English translation © 2010 VIZ Media, LLC

  Cover and interior design by Sam Elzway

  All rights reserved.

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

  HAIKASORU

  Published by

  VIZ Media, LLC

  295 Bay Street

  San Francisco, CA 94133

  www.haikasoru.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4215-3954-6

  Haikasoru eBook edition, August 2010

  CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

  About the Author

 

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

 

 

 

 

  01

  I have a story to tell.

 

 

 

 

 

  02

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

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

  So,

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

  Yeah, me and Miach were the weird kids.

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

  Miach’s favorite line.

  Miach knew everything. For example:

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What do you mean, ‘persistence’?”

  “The persistence of solitude.”

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

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

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

  I didn’t need to ask what she meant.

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

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

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

  Maybe:

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

  Miach reached out and grabbed one of my breasts.

  My left breast. The breast closest to my heart.

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

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

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

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

  “Miach, p-please!”

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

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

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

  ≡

  Miach first discovered me in the park.

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

  Spooky.

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

  Resource awareness.

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

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

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

  ≡

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

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

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

  But Miach saw me.

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

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

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

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

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