Harmony
Page 5
Brand name of an alcoholic beverage originating in France’s Pomerol region. A “bordeaux wine.” Noted for its label depicting Saint Peter, the twelfth apostle.This château wine vaulted from relative obscurity to immense popularity after winning a gold medal at the 1889 Paris Exposition. One of the most expensive wines in its heyday, after the Maelstrom and the ascendance of lifeism it shared the same fate as all other alcoholic beverages.
It had already been over forty years since anyone in a developed country had been able to freely enjoy alcohol. “What do we have here?” Os Cara breathed as she caught the bottle of forbidden pleasure lightly in her left hand. “I would ask if you have no shame, but then, I already know the answer.”
“It’s called wine.” I snorted. “Heard of it?”
She didn’t even look at the label. “A bordeaux. Lots of merlot in these—100 percent in some barrels, depending on the year. Makes for a very smooth texture.”
“No shit.”
“Most certainly not. I drank one of these when I was much younger, actually. The last generation that could truly relish alcohol. We had a Petrus just like this one in my house.”
“I hear it was quite expensive,” I said, stepping closer to the trembling Alpha and my boss, even as I felt like I was walking into a trap.
“My family was quite well-to-do before the Maelstrom.”
“You don’t say,” I said, now standing directly in front of my boss. Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg.
“Well, this won’t do.” She presented the bottle. “You know how embarrassing something like this is for us.”
“I haven’t lost all capacity for rational thought, if that’s what you’re suggesting, Prime,” I said, my smile thin.
She glared at me. Alpha, sweating bullets, shrank back into the shadow of his monitors. He wasn’t even seeing us there anymore. His eyes were looking off into the distance somewhere, probably at the wreckage of his career.
“At least you seem to be aware of your own wrongdoing. However, you clearly do not comprehend where we are and what we’re doing here.”
I had to laugh at that. It was precisely because I knew so thoroughly what kind of place the Sahara was that I had specifically requested a transfer here. There was silence again until my boss spoke.
“The Nigerian armistice monitoring group is in an extremely delicate situation at present. The report that we Helix agents submit will determine which of the two parties, the Nigerians or the Tuareg, had the right of this conflict.”
I shrugged. I was pretty sure that if it became known we were partaking of smokes and booze, the Tuareg would probably consider us their allies, what with their predilection for living a life of moderation. This was apparently not the scenario my boss had in mind, however. She began to walk around me in a tight circle.
“The monitoring we do on behalf of admedistrative society must not be allowed to itself incite more conflict. If word got out that we, who by all rights should be the upholders of lifeism and champions of long life and health, were indulging in such harmful substances as alcohol and tobacco, it would be a disaster.”
A disaster for whom, I wondered. It certainly wouldn’t bother me any. I wasn’t harming anyone with my secondhand smoke. And shouldn’t I be allowed to harm myself as much as I pleased? No, I immediately corrected myself. Even thinking that was verboten in this age of public correctness.
“What I want to know is how you kept your own WatchMe silent all this time. Any amount of alcohol consumption should trigger the medicules in your system, which would immediately inform the health supervision server—”
“Well, being out here in the sticks and all, the server does go off-line pretty frequently,” I said, as though my boss really needed an explanation of conditions here at the armistice monitoring camp. “And besides, we girls know a little magic. That is, those of us who still remember that we’re girls.”
“That’s very funny,” she said without a trace of humor in her voice. “I don’t know what underhanded means you used to get this contraband, but I will have you know what damage your actions have caused to our operations.”
“I already know: none.”
I clapped a hand on her shoulder as lightly as I could. In her crimson coat, Os Cara Stauffenberg quaked with rage. I ran my finger gently over the embossed snakes curling around the staff of knowledge on the WHO badge she wore. “I wouldn’t worry about your badge getting tarnished, Os Cara. Because you’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you.”
Os Cara clucked her tongue. It occurred to me that this was probably the most dramatic expression of disdain she, a dyed-in-the-wool member of admedistrative society, could muster.
“Of course I can’t go public with this.”
She glared at me. “If the authority of this agency were to be impugned, then all our efforts to make this world a healthier, more peaceful, more charitable place will have been wasted. Even in the short term, were I to go on the record about your little ‘party time,’ our monitoring operation here in Niger would lose any and all credibility overnight.”
“So sorry to hear that, Prime.”
At this point, Alpha seemed to realize that things might not be as terribly bad as he’d imagined them to be. I gave him a pat on the shoulder as well, saying, “I certainly hope nothing of the sort happens to our wonderful operation here.”
“I’m not finished!”
Alpha resumed his former state of rigid terror.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to take responsibility for what you’ve done, Senior Inspector Kirie. You will be returning home on the next available flight and remain until you’ve seen the error of your ways.”
“Home? You don’t mean Japan…”
No fucking way.
After all I’d done to escape that gulag—the overeating, the starvation, the loss of a friend—all ending in the pursuit of my current career flying from one war zone to another.
No fucking way.
“That’s right. Japan. I won’t have you using this battlefield for your recreation room. You betrayed us. I want you to go back and experience what it’s like to truly love and be loved by your neighbor, Tuan. You will learn how to be publicly correct.”
My boss set the bottle of wine down by one of Alpha’s terminals and strode out of the tent, leaving me rooted to the spot. I was already beginning to imagine the days of depression ahead of me. I would be living in Japan. The place I hated as a youth, the place Miach detested with all her heart. Japan.
“You’re incredible,” Alpha whispered, a sigh of relief escaping his lips. “Simply amazing. I can’t believe you got off with such a light punishment. I’d heard you were a powerhouse, Tuan, but that was something else. No wonder Étienne calls you his queen.”
I felt the sudden urge to slap the cheerfully babbling Alpha hard across the cheek, but instead of allowing myself to resort to violence, I picked up the wine and slammed the entire bottle of Château Petrus in one breath. A stream of the ruby liquid spilled from the side of my mouth and ran down my chin, splattering over my crimson Helix agent’s coat. Alpha swallowed, his momentary elation evaporating more quickly than the wine on my collar.
I needed this. I needed to be able to drink like this. It might be my last drink in a long time.
My heart sank.
Sayonara, Sahara.
Catch you around, Kel Tamasheq.
06
And so I found myself stranded in the desert called normal life. A vast wasteland of public correctness and people as resources.
Stuck in a sinkhole called harmony.
I could see it spreading out from the airport like an oily film on the land. Forming a gestalt that made me want to retch. I spotted clusters of residential buildings below, square little blocks in inoffensive pastels. Like tiny multiplying pixels of artificial life on a monitor. The PassengerBird I was on flexed its wings, tracing a soft circle through the air. An announcement sounded near my inner ear, telling me to prepare for landing.
An RPG comes flying out of nowhere, slamming into the side of the PassengerBird.
The giant bird flies into pieces, raining down its contents—the passengers—on the little Cubist residents far below. In death, the bird looks just like the WarBird I shot down over the Sahara. The men in suits spill out of its body cavity so lightly and evenly, just like in Golconde
As the bird touched down on the runway I realized I had been daydreaming. The other passengers were already standing from their seats, getting ready to disembark. I grabbed my bag, left the bird, went through luggage screening, and spilled out with the rest of the bird droppings into a burgundy-colored airport lobby.
The moment that I stepped off the PassengerBird, the augmentedreality in my contacts kicked in. Just about everything in my field of vision had AR metadata associated with it. I glanced at the entrance to a café and saw the menu hanging in midair with a meter next to it telling me how many seats were empty and next to that some stars indicating favorable reviews.
Everything in our world had a user review attached to it.
Even people had little social assessment stars stuck on them.
Café de Paris in the airport lounge: four stars.
Tuan Kirie: four stars.
Cian Reikado: three.
“Tuan! Tuantuantuan!”
A little girl’s voice shouting my name.
Since I didn’t know any little girls, I was pretty sure it had to be Cian Reikado. She was one of the only people who knew I was coming back. I went to pick up my Helix agent code at the baggage counter, then turned to Cian, who was yelping and jumping with excitement. If she’d had a tail, she’d have been wagging it for sure. Some public metadata was attached to her body—the name of the admedistration she belonged to and the
“How’d you find me in that crowd?” I asked.
“What are you talking about, Tuan? You stand out in any crowd!”
“Oh?”
“You should really watch that—you probably attract enough attention as it is with your job and all. Wow, you’re really, uh, rough-looking too. No offense.”
“Comes with the territory. I can’t help it if battlefields always tend to be the deserts and the highlands and the swamps. It’s tough on the skin.”
To tell the truth, my skin condition probably had more to do with my various indulgences than any battlefield conditions. The only thing keeping my WatchMe from alerting the nearest admedistration-contracted counselor was the DummyMe I’d installed to send phony data about my body to the server, but the DummyMe fell short when it came to fooling the human eye. I must’ve stuck out like a sore thumb.
Having bad skin meant you weren’t living up to at least one of the basic requirements of lifeist society. A sure sign you were a wrench in harmony’s cogs. Lifeist society meant everyone, man or woman, had to conform to certain standards. Nonconformity made itself physically obvious.
Bad skin? A sure sign of poor self-control.
Shadows under your eyes? A lack of proper publicly correct resource awareness.
All of this was reflected in your SA score. The vast majority of admedistrations required all adults to make their histories, including their medical records, public knowledge. This was, in part, to make the process of assigning a social assessment score as transparent as possible. No doubt, if politicians these days were as fat as the leaders of old had been, such open sharing of personal information would never have come to pass.
I remembered my surprise when I came across pictures of great leaders while leafing through historical archives.
There they were, unadulterated, men and women of power, and most of them were grossly overweight.
Judged by modern standards, someone like Churchill could never be considered a hero. Who would trust a man as copiously fat as that? Any nude painted before the eighteenth century was completely out as well.
I came across an old schoolyard rhyme once.
Fatty fatty, two-by-four, can’t fit through the bathroom door!
Words like “fatty” hadn’t been used in years—too great a risk of hurting someone’s feelings. Not that there was anyone chubby enough to rate the term anyway. Like alcohol, tobacco, and the morally depraved man who paid money for sex with girls, these terms of belittlement had simply faded away. They were soon followed in their extinction by fat people and even skinny people. All gone. Under the constant monitoring of WatchMe and the constant advice of a health consultant, obesity and emaciation both had been driven out of the human experience.
I looked at Cian, my friend who had tried to starve herself to death along with me and Miach.
Her body fit perfectly within the prescribed margins for a healthy adult.
A boring body, in a boring adult size.
I quickened my pace across the airport lobby—itself designed with incredible attention paid to reducing any feeling of oppressive authority the structure might have naturally possessed. A cluster of yellow tables stood out against the burgundy interior, grabbing the eye. As I headed for the subway, dragging my bags behind me, Cian made an effort to match my pace. It was incredible really. For all the vast space here, and the high ceilings, I couldn’t detect a whiff of authority to the place. Admedistrative design was sterile like that. By their very nature, large architectural spaces had a certain fascist scent to them, a prideful authority that came from being monumental and leaked out whether the builders intended it to be there or not. Large structures made human beings small by comparison. Even public places, like this airport, did that.
Which was why the designers of the place had pulled out all the technological stops to reduce the impact of the airport’s size. I could sense the attempt to cover the unwanted stench of power, and it made me sick to my stomach. Calling the place a monastery made it sound too Christian, but it was true that the world we lived in often felt like it was being run by nuns. It was fascism, courtesy of Mary, Mother of God.
The world had been made thoroughly gentle. Even the arts.
My profiling sheet—just one of a multitude of healthmaintenance applications I had to use in my daily life—was like another version of me.
A version of me that accepted everything the real me hated.
My profiling sheet lived inside the admedistration server from where it monitored my daily routine, identifying my likes and dislikes and keeping a careful eye out for anything, be it literature or an image, tha
t might cause me emotional trauma. Any novel or essay I was about to read would be scanned in advance and cross-referenced with my therapy records. If any content therein touched on a past trauma I had experienced, it would often be filtered out before I ever saw it. At the very least, I would receive a warning. This work of art contains potentially emotionally damaging material, or my favorite, This novel contains possible violations to the general morality code, article 40896-A as determined by the Health and Clarity Admedistration Moral Review Board of 4/12/2049.
When all possibility of fear was removed from our environment, a more subtle kind of fear replaced it.
“Do you know something?” I heard Miach say. “A long, really long time ago, there was this artist who used an airplane and smoke to write the word BANG in the sky over Hiroshima. What do you think?”
“Bang, like the atomic bomb? That’s in pretty bad taste, I’d say.”
“It’s totally in bad taste!” Miach said, grinning. “The artist got so much criticism that he had to publicly apologize. Because his art made some people unhappy, it hurt people’s feelings. But no one would even do that kind of thing these days. They’d be warned away from it by the admedistration before they even got to it. They probably wouldn’t even have the idea in the first place. With these filters warning us what we’re about to see all the time, no one looks at anything. How could an artist get any bad ideas to start with? I look at old books and paintings and I envy the imaginations of our predecessors. I really do.”
“Why?”
“Because there was always the chance that they would hurt with their art. Always the chance they would make someone sad or angry.”
My eyes fell on an old man, a custodial worker, cleaning the airport. Clearly, he hadn’t been paying as much attention to his health as he should have. His SA score was about as low as it got. A low SA score brought job security of a kind—no one would dream of taking your job away from you, out of pity—but it also meant an utter lack of mobility. You were basically stuck doing whatever it was they made you do. That said, the old man was very likely leading a fairly comfortable life, thanks to food distributed by volunteers and a living support center where he could sleep at night. He might’ve even had some family.