by Project Itoh
“Kids would fall off the top?”
“They sure would. Jungle gyms back then didn’t catch them like the ones do now. Metal bars aren’t intelligent. They can’t change, and they aren’t even soft. Some kids hit their heads on the bars and died of skull fractures. And the sandboxes were breeding pools for viruses and bacteria. The park was a very dangerous place.”
I hadn’t the faintest idea why this person, arguably the strangest girl in class, was giving me an archaeological lecture on the history of jungle gyms. At least by then I had regained enough presence of mind to play along.
“So,” I ventured, “what we call parks nowadays are very different from what they used to be.”
She shook her head. “Not really. The look of the park hasn’t changed for a century. There are trees and things to play on. There were kids back then who sat on benches reading books like I was just now. What’s different is that the sand in the sandbox and the jungle gym and the climbing ropes weren’t intelligent. They didn’t care what happened to the kids that played on them.”
“Sorry, that thing you were looking at just now, that’s a book?” I asked.
“That’s right, Tuan Kirie. I was reading a book. I always carry one around with me. I usually read it during breaks in class.”
Miach pulled her book out of her bag and showed it to me. The cover read An Unremarkable Man.
“Doesn’t sound that interesting.”
Miach laughed at that. “As I thought! I know I have a tendency to fade into the woodwork, but still, I’m amazed you haven’t noticed me before—that girl always off on her own, always reading some strange thing. You don’t pay much attention to your surroundings, do you?”
How hadn’t I noticed her? Practically the only girl who didn’t join in any of the class groups, reading some strange artifact during recess? I thought for a moment that maybe no one had noticed her but immediately dismissed that. With all the initial interest in making friends with Miach, the other kids must have seen her, wondered about her. I was the only one oblivious.
“It’s because you don’t want to pay attention to people. You don’t want to try to be friends. That’s who you want to be, isn’t it? You run with the other girls in their little groups, and you go out to volunteer on the weekends, but the person you’re most concerned with is yourself. You don’t give a rat’s ass about harmony. That’s why you didn’t even bother to notice me and my book.”
She was right.
She was right, and I was sure no one else but she had ever noticed this about me. It took me a while to regain my footing as I considered how to respond. All I managed was a completely tangential, and ultimately stupid, observation.
“Aren’t books kind of heavy and hard to carry around?”
“Yes, they are heavy and hard to carry around, Miss Kirie. Being heavy and hard to carry around is downright antisocial behavior these days, don’t you think?” she said in a voice like a boy soprano’s. And then she began to walk, holding her bag in her hands behind her back. I’m not sure to this day why I followed her. I only remember that it seemed as if what she said, her every word, was cutting into the heart of something I’d been unable to express for so long, and hearing her say it felt good. Or maybe it was that she had found an old blade inside me, rusty from seawater, and given it a bit of a sharpening. Incidentally, when I asked Cian about how she met Miach sometime later, she said she’d met her in the park too.
“So,” Miach said, without turning around. “Q: if a person goes their whole life without falling from anything, how will they know what it means to fall?” I could only see the back of her head, but I was sure she was smiling.
“You’re talking about the jungle gym.”
“Not only that, but good enough.”
“Isn’t it instinct to be afraid of falling?”
It seemed to me pretty unlikely that someone could really go their entire lives without ever falling once, but even if someone managed it, I felt that somehow they would still have a fear of falling in their head.
Miach sighed, a sort of noncommittal sigh neither affirming nor denying my theory.
“So that’s your answer? It’s human nature to be afraid of falling—we’re just made that way?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you ever fallen off something?”
In fact, I had. It was when I was still pretty young. We’d gone camping, and I slipped off a boulder and fell into a stream. I could remember the instant it happened. You hear people talk about how time slows down during an accident, but for me it seemed like as soon as I realized my feet were slipping I was on my knees in the water.
I had scraped my leg on my way down, and when I looked at it, I saw a thin line of color emerging from my right calf, curling off into the slightly cloudy water like a red ribbon. A little trout had gone swimming through it, and I thought he might get tangled in the thread, but of course he didn’t. A moment later my father was helping me out of the stream. He used his portable med kit to fix my scrape, but I still remember what it looked like, that red thread of blood, drifting almost sensually in the water. The medicule paste—the same stuff that Miach claimed could kill fifty thousand people—quickly sealed the cut while the same medcare tank made antibodies to kill any infectious bacteria I might have picked up. My father attached the unit to the medcare port beneath my shoulder blade.
“What did it feel like, the moment you fell?”
Miach stopped and turned toward me. I answered honestly that it had been over so quick I didn’t remember feeling anything. One moment I was on the boulder, the next I was in the water.
“Oh.”
Miach shrugged and began walking again. I followed along behind.
“So you think someone who’s never taken a fall in their life wouldn’t be afraid of falling?”
“I didn’t say that. But they could forget their fear. Just like we’re forgetting what disease means.”
“Disease is when you get older more quickly and your muscles stiffen up.”
Miach looked over her shoulder, a smile on her lips. “That’s what it means now, true, but that refers to only one condition that affects a few unlucky people with some unlucky genes. I didn’t mean that kind of disease. I mean just getting sick. Like catching a cold or having a headache. Ever heard of those?”
I shook my head.
“In the past, there were lots of diseases in us, thousands. Everyone got sick, and this is only half a century ago I’m talking about. When the nuclear warheads fell during the Maelstrom, everyone got cancer from the radiation. The whole world was one big disease.”
“Oh, I learned about that.”
Many people developed cancer from the radiation. At the same time, the radiation caused mutations in China and the depths of Africa, spawning a flood of unknown viruses. With such a clear and present threat to its health, the world transformed overnight from a capitalist society monitored by governmental units to a medical welfare society organized by admedistrative bodies.
“Right? I’m not sure why I have that memorized. Impressed?”
“Yes, but they never tell you about how people used to get sick before then. You may have your history lesson memorized, but you don’t even know what a cold is. How could you? You’ve never experienced one. Our society’s accomplished a pretty amazing thing. Thanks to WatchMe and medcare, we’ve driven almost every disease off the face of the planet.”
I hadn’t told anyone at school who my father was—if they knew anything, it was that he was someone important. Nuada Kirie had been the first scientist to put forth the theory that led to the technologies in WatchMe in a thesis he wrote with an associate thirty-five years ago now.
Did Miach know? What kind of face would she make if I told her? Would she hate me if I told her that this world she hated so much had all started with my dad? I wondered if I’d get a pardon if I told her that I too hated the world.
“You know we’re living in the future,” Miach said, her grim frown at odds with what should have been a positive statement. “And the future is, in a word, boring. ‘The future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.’ A man named Ballard said that. He was a science fiction writer. And he was talking about here, this place, our world. Our world where the admedistration takes care of everyone’s lives and health. We’re trapped in someone’s antique vision of the future, and it sucks.”
We walked on awhile until we came to a crossroads where Miach stopped and took me by the hand. I froze. This was different. She lifted my hand up before her face, with all the obeisance of a courtier before the queen, and said, “We’ve taken the mechanics of nature—things we didn’t even understand before—and outsourced them. Getting sick, living, who knows what’s next? Maybe even thinking. These things used to belong just to us, they could only belong to us, and now they’re part of the market system, handled externally. I don’t want to be a part of the world. My body is my own. I want to live my own life.Not sitting around like some sheep waiting to be strangled by some stranger’s kindness.”
And then she kissed the back of my hand.
I tried to yank my hand away, but I was already too late. The feel of her lips was permanently inscribed on my skin.
Cold.
That was my first thought. Her lips were cold. But it didn’t feel bad; in fact it left a pleasant chill on my skin, like an aftertaste, that seeped down in between the cells. When I looked up, Miach was already across the street, heading in the direction away from my house.
“You and I are cut from the same cloth, Tuan Kirie,” she called out, smiling again. Then Miach broke into a run and kept running until I could see her no longer.
≡
That was how I met Miach Mihie.
I walked by a park. She was reading a book. That was all.
It was enough to start a friendship that, short-lived though it was, would change the rest of my life.
03
Before I talk about my separation from and reunion with Miach Mihie, a story which begins in the Sahara, I should start by telling you about Cian Reikado’s death by her own hand. It had been thirteen years since the three of us met. Forty-eight hours before Cian did a face-plant in a plate of insalata di caprese with
and died, I was in the Sahara, in a world of painted blue and vivid yellow divided along a single line.
The colors met at the horizon, lush, permeated with pigment, enough to make anyone forget that the Sahara used to be a desert.
Forgotten by man, forgotten from history.
The shimmering waves of heat, the layered petals, even the gentle swaying of stalks in the breeze were all traces left by the painter’s brush—a landscape turned into century-old art. A Mark Rothko abstract in yellow and blue. I sat looking out at it through half-lidded eyes from my vantage point atop a WHO armored transport. My lips relished the texture of the cigar they held, membranes of skin caressing the slight roughness of hard banana leaves. I enjoyed my illicit vice. Our caravan sat at the end of a vast sea of sunflowers, here in the place they once called the Sahara desert. Here, where the RRWs once fell.
The Reliable Replacement Warhead, a type of warhead produced en masse by a nation called the United States of America, starting on or around the year 2010. These warheads were hailed as the “nuclear warhead of the twenty-first century,” intended to replace the aging twentieth century arsenal with better durability, safety, and ease of use. During the Maelstrom which broke out in the English-speaking countries of North America in 2019, many of these warheads found their way to the Third World. And though EU forces, primarily those of France and Germany, intervened and were successful in disabling many nuclear sites, a final toll of thirty-five RRWs were lost from the American arsenal. Of these, fourteen were later recovered, two were detonated on American soil, and the remaining nineteen were used in various conflicts around the world. (Excerpt from an International Atomic Energy Agency report.)
Thus the sunflowers.
It was an old method, yet still very effective. Whenever a war faded into peace, people planted flowers. The only thing different this time had been the scale of the effort. Enough yellow flowers to send a hippie crying for a flashback. It was old-fashioned phytoremediation. Genetically modified sunflowers sent roots deep into the soil, sucking up strontium and uranium and other pollutants along with the nutrients they needed to grow. In the course of a flower’s life cycle, the land was cleansed.
As with so many other nations, the assembled countries of North Africa that so gleefully purchased nukes from unscrupulous characters in America during the Maelstrom and then dropped them with wild abandon here in their own land were now no more than a chapter in the history books. A brief scene in history’s play from an age in which every war of independence bore the label “terrorism.”
“They’re here, ma reine.”
Étienne called up to me from where he leaned against the side of the transport. He was wearing the standard pink medical troop–issue fatigues. Our guests would be coming, bearing gas lighters and cigars. I spotted a cluster of heads wrapped in blue peeking out from the admedistrative society–planted sea of sunflowers. They stuck out against the brilliant yellow of everything around them. The Kel Tamasheq had always worn those indigo turbans and veils, and they probably always would. They even wore them when they rode to war on camelback, which was impressive considering what terrible camouflage indigo made in a field of flowers.
Four Tamasheq warriors emerged from the lapping edge of the sunflower sea, each with the traditional AK-47 on his shoulder. I got down from the roof of the transport and walked up to their leader.
“Greetings, woman of the medicine people. It has been some time.”
“Greetings, warrior of the Tuareg.”
The man in indigo shook his head. “Do you know what this word Tuareg means in Arabic?”
“Sorry.”
“It means ‘the people abandoned by Allah.’ It is the name given to us by outsiders.”
“So what does Kel Tamasheq mean then?”
“The ones who speak Tamasheq.”
I couldn’t help but think that “the people abandoned by Allah” sounded a hell of a lot cooler, and I told him so. Our gods, Asklepios and Hippocrates, watched closely over us, the “medicine people,” and in their name we built temples to clinical medicine and struck down nearly every disease ever known to man. Our faith was such that we would continue striking them down, and so the medicine people would never be abandoned by their gods. We had even put WatchMe inside our bodies, just to make sure there was no place where the eyes of our gods could not see.
“You seem to dislike your own gods, woman of the medicine people.”
“Yet you have no compunction about receiving their bounty from us.” I had meant it as sarcasm, but the Tuareg smiled, white teeth against tan skin. “Yes, but the difference between us is that we worship only the minimum amount, no more. Luckily for us, the gods are very understanding about this a
rrangement.”
I shook my head and sighed at the pragmatic wisdom of these desert—well, ex-desert—dwellers, and pulled a memorycel from my pocket.
“You think we bow too deeply to our gods, then?”
“In a word, yes. ‘All things in moderation’ you say, but you do not practice it. You are so filled with your faith that you must push it upon us as well. And this is why we fight.”
“You don’t think we represent the Nigerians, do you? We’re not even an old-style government. We are an organization under the Geneva Convention, a consensus of medical conclaves— admedistrations—from all over the world. We’re not allies of Niger, or the Tuareg for that matter. We’re just an armistice monitoring group and not even a sanctioned branch of that.”
“Whether you are Nigerian or of the medicine people it is all the same to the Kel Tamasheq. The only thing different is the surface—your skin. And sometimes not even that.”
“Yes, but admedistrations are governmental systems. It’s politics, not faith.”
“Faith, imperialism—these are two words for the same thing. Niger may invoke this lifeism when they tell us to connect to their server, but it is just imperialism, plain and simple. In the past, we fought against the colonialism of England and France. When Qaddafi saw our bravery, he promised us glory as warriors, but the moment things went south, as they say, we were driven from his lands. We have fought dictators in Mali, Niger, and Algeria. All of them use the same imperialist hardware. Your lifeism is just new software for the same old machinery.”
I sighed again. As a Helix agent operating as part of WHO, political negotiations were a large part of my work, and yet I found politics boring in the extreme. I shook the memorycel in my right hand.
“Then this med patch is imperialist software too.”
“Which is why we partake only in moderation.”
The warrior snapped his fingers, and the men behind him went back into the sunflowers. When they emerged, they were carrying several wooden crates between them. I knew what the crates contained—precious goods still enjoyed widely outside of admedistrative society and strictly forbidden within it. Things like the cigar I was still smoking, and booze, and a whole variety of other unhealthy delights.