by Project Itoh
Cian was slightly shorter than I was, so when we walked side by side, she had to lengthen her strides just to keep up. When I walked, I didn’t care whether I was matching anyone else’s pace or not. I had decided that was how I was going to walk a long time ago. Right after I’d lost Miach.
And there it was. Walking together with Cian brought on the feeling of loss I had dreaded was out there somewhere waiting for me. Miach should’ve been standing right there, right by Cian, book held behind her back, telling us in great detail (without actually looking at us) how we could damage the world in which we lived.
It was like Cian and I were a temple from which someone had stolen our golden Buddha named Miach Mihie. I couldn’t help feeling like there was this space in front of us that should have been filled.
Odd that being together with someone should remind me of what was missing. Our charismatic leader, gone these thirteen years. She carried far too much knowledge in her tiny body, and far too much hatred, and far too much beauty. And now she was gone.
I want to dance on the graves of those kind, healthy people.
A waltz, I think.
A nonexistent Miach looked back at us over her shoulder.
Miach Mihie. Miach Mihie. Miach Mihie.
We passed by volunteers handing out artificial protein soup to political refugees in the airport lobby and took the elevator down to the floor where the subways connected to the airport. On my way down, I had the sudden sensation that Miach was standing right behind me, and I had to turn and look, but it was only Cian.
“You going home?” she asked me as we waited on the subway platform. The platform had been painted an inoffensive sea blue.
I shook my head. “I’ll look for a hotel or find someplace to crash. There’s nothing for me at home.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Everyone wants to hear your stories, you know.”
“Who’s everyone?” I chuckled and shook my head. “Actually, I did get a message from one of the neighbors saying they wanted to throw a welcome home party. They were going to call everyone for two blocks around and be here waiting when my PassengerBird landed. Can you imagine? No thanks. That’s the last thing I need. Especially since my mom was so enthusiastic about the idea.”
“Why not let them have their party? It could be fun.”
“I have nothing to talk to them about.”
“What are you saying? You could tell them about the Sahara, or where you were before that—Colombia, was it? You’ve been to so many places and seen so many things, Tuan.”
Yeah, I could tell them stories. Like the one about the child soldiers drugged up and made to shoot their own parents and siblings for target practice. Or the bloody severed arms and legs piled up in heaps like firewood. Hardly anyone who bought into the admedistration’s protected life had the faintest clue about the realities of war. They were far too busy being nice to everyone in their immediate vicinity to care. Cian was as ignorant as any of them. Ignorant and innocent. Nothing had changed in that regard.
“And I think they’d want to hear about what you’ve been doing,” Cian was saying.
“I’m just not interested.” I sighed for effect. “Cian, you volunteering at all?”
“A little. Three days a week. Delivering meals and taking care of the elderly, that sort of thing.”
“Morality sessions and health conferences?”
“Online, yeah. About fifteen hours a month. It’s not too bad.”
What was this? One of my friends, a girl who couldn’t stand this world, who tried to kill herself just to leave a mark on its perfect face, had conformed completely to a typical, publicly correct lifestyle.
Or maybe it was less personal. Maybe it was just that kids grew up and became adults.
Miach’s ghost hovered nearby, a cold smile on her lips as she whispered.
This body, these tits, this ass, this uterus. These are mine.
Aren’t they?
So after our failure, Cian had taken the plunge headfirst into the adult world. The only one dragging her heels was me, and I couldn’t decide whether that was admirable or pitiable.
I hung, suspended in space, somewhere between Miach Mihie’s ghost and Cian Reikado’s innocence.
“Look, Cian, I’ve been overseas a long time, right? So I just don’t know the people who live around my home. I haven’t volunteered with them or gone to health meetings with them. I’m just not very connected to the community.”
I explained to her that being a globe-trotting Helix agent meant:
Because we lacked a conclave to assess us, the admedistration awarded us an arbitrary SA score in order to account for the inconsistency that resulted from doing something very important to the continuation of the admedistration’s lifestyle while, by necessity, being forced to operate independently of that admedistration.
“Oh. Really?”
“Really.”
As I was explaining my life to Cian, I couldn’t help but feeling that I had somehow become Miach. Miach explaining how to use a medcare unit to make a chemical weapon capable of killing fifty thousand people. Miach who could make a pill that would shut down your entire digestive tract.
Miach who could wear a cool smile as she told you she wanted to watch the world burn.
I felt like she must have back then, filled with knowledge no one else had, talking openly, brazenly, full of confidence, fearing nothing, giving every word a declaration.
Hey, Cian, did you know that if you install DummyMe, you can spoof your physical data before it gets sent to the server? Hey, Cian, did you know that you can do anything to yourself with DummyMe installed? Hey, Cian, have you heard about this… Hey, Cian… Say, Cian…
But instead of playing Miach’s doppelgänger, I merely smiled cynically and said, “The real reason they give me a score is because if they didn’t, I’d be labeled a sociopath.”
Cian frowned, not understanding. “So you’re not going home?”
“Probably not.”
Cian stepped in front of me. “Then let’s go get something to eat, at least. There’s this new building near where I live. It looks all bumpy and white from the outside, like it was made out of solid plaster. But when you go inside, you can see out. It’s this new intelligent material, a special light-refracting Styrofoam glass.”
“Sounds pleasant. I’m really not in the mood.”
“We could eat, and then you can come over to my house. It’s only eleven o’clock. How about lunch?”
I had an urge to check with the nonexistent Miach. “Want to go with me and Cian to get some lunch?”
I sighed and told her I’d go with her to lunch. Only lunch. I followed after Cian, getting into the first bean-shaped light yellow train that came sliding down the tracks. My WatchMe linked to my credit account, deducting the appropriate rail fee. I was just realizing how long it had been since I rode the subway in Japan when I looked around at the other passengers and felt a sudden fear grip me.
They were all the same. Everyone.
It hadn’t been so blatantly apparent on the battlefield. Working with an international group meant there were a lot of people from a lot of different place
s and races around all the time, and more than a few of them were indulging on the sly, like me.
That was definitely not the case here.
For the first time, I realized how bizarre a sight the medically standardized Japanese populace presented. The difference between the couple sitting in the seats nearest to me was no more than the difference between mannequin A and mannequin B. Neither was too fat nor too skinny. Every person on the train conformed to a particular body type. Everyone fit within a healthy target margin. I felt like a stranger in a house of mirrors—a country of mirrors.
How had things come to this? How could everyone be the same when simple genetics told us everyone was different?
The more rigid and narrower the goal, the easier it will be for the weak to achieve.
Miach’s phantom again, whispering in my ear. Talking just like she always did when giving us a lecture. I remembered her saying how human will could grow rigid even while it succumbed to temptation.
Humans were like a broken meter whose needle swung back and forth between desire and willpower, always all or nothing, never lingering in between. There was no room for moderation. Even a pigeon had a will of its own. Volition just happened to be a good fit for vertebrates, which was why our brains kept it around.
“Is something wrong? Do you feel unwell? Here, take my seat,” a woman offered, seeing the momentary fear caused by social panic flash across my face. My AR told me that she was a politician—a coordinator or commissioner for an admedistration somewhere—though her face looked no different from anyone else’s. She too was well within the margins. A healthy, standardized face. It was a feature—that is, the lack of distinct features—I assumed you would find even more the higher up you got in the chain of command. I remembered everyone at Geneva headquarters looking more or less the same.
“I’m okay,” I told the politician and went a short distance down the train car. Cian caught up to me, a worried look on her face.
“You shouldn’t have walked away like that. It’s rude. She’s an admedistration councilor somewhere.”
“I know. I saw the AR. Sorry.”
“I think you’re just exhausted from work, Tuan. It must be hard, doing all that. But you’re really making a contribution to society.”
Me, making a contribution to society.
Making a contribution by going to a battlefield where I could smoke.
Making a contribution by consciously choosing not to be part of society—where I undoubtedly would have either slashed my own wrists or cut into someone else a long time ago.
Which was how I was able to agree with Cian, without a trace of sarcasm, that I was indeed making a great contribution to society.
My path and Cian’s had diverged sharply after Miach’s death. For Cian, all the enmity she had felt toward society, her family, her hometown, and school had passed. For her it was like a rite of passage, a phase everyone went through before returning to a standardized life. For me, I had gone on collecting the knowledge I surely would have gotten from Miach were she still alive, and on the surface, I too appeared to be conforming, just like Cian. My grades kept climbing until I took Miach’s former place at the head of the class. In a sense, I had become Miach’s doppelgänger.I was becoming Miach Mihie.
Cian wasn’t becoming Miach. She was joining a club—a club at least nine out of ten Japanese belonged to. A club with tightly defined body fat ratios and stable immune systems and known RNA transcription error rates.
All while I went from party zone to party zone. Battlefield to battlefield.
From airport to airport.
Cigar to cigar.
Bottle to bottle.
Except this time, I’d gone from Château Petrus to insalata di caprese, in a place where there was little likelihood of seeing a single smoke or drink.
I had said goodbye to the depressing, dizzying subway and now sat enjoying a healthy meal in an Italian restaurant with my old friend.
There were slices of tomato burying water buffalo cheese that had been completely drained of fat, with a light sprinkling of olive oil on top. We were on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building. The meals here were noteworthy for each bearing a slight risk to the diner.
When you ordered a plate, the menu displayed your total calorie intake and any potential risk of chromosomal damage you might suffer from consuming the food. Every single item on the menu had a warning attached. Once you had read the risk information to your satisfaction, you could order what you wanted to eat, within the prescribed limits set for you by the health consultant on contract with your admedistration.
There were a few other people in the restaurant, but not too many. Everyone sitting around the marigold tablecloths were just like the people I had seen in the subway, each well within the margins of a healthy Japanese body.
“It’s been a long time since we ate together,” Cian said, watching the server arrange our insalata. It occurred to me that since the day we had both tried to throw our lives away and failed, Cian and I hadn’t eaten together once.
“No kidding.”
“It’s a little strange, actually, being here with just the two of us.”
I looked out the window at the view from the sixtysecond floor.
The view that Miach wanted to mar.
The view that Cian had gotten used to.
The view I had escaped from.
“Actually, I think this might be the first time we’ve ever eaten together without Miach. Just the two of us, I mean.”
“I think I ate alone with Miach a few times,” I said, “ before she brought you into things.”
“Yes, I think you’re right. You were friends before I met you, weren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t call us friends. We didn’t find each other. Miach pretty much grabbed me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I was walking along one day and she literally ran up and grabbed me. Remember the story about the jungle gym?”
“Oh, right.”
“Wasn’t it pretty much the same way with you, Cian? With me she asked me whether I knew why the jungle gym twisted and warped like it did.”
“Maybe she was casting a net.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, she was sitting in the park reading a book, right? Maybe she was waiting for someone to notice her? A girl like me or you.”
Miach, waiting for someone to notice her? Something about it didn’t fit with the image I had. Miach hated everything about healthy society. She hated how everyone worried about everyone else, offering help whether it was asked for or not. It didn’t make sense for her to want out of the system and then go looking for friends. I told Cian I didn’t agree.
“Huh? Why?”
“I just think you’re wrong about her. Miach wasn’t looking for friends, she was looking for kindred spirits—comrades in arms.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not really. They’re both kinds of acquaintances, in a loose sense of the term, but the bond between kindred spirits isn’t friendship per se. It’s more like the bond between fellow soldiers.”
Picking up knife and fork, I cut off a bite-sized chunk from my insalata. Cian was looking at me, clearly trying to comprehend what I was saying and just as clearly failing.
“See, Miach didn’t want friendship,” I continued. “She wanted someone to fight by her side. You can’t fight a war alone, you know.”
“The more the merrier?”
“You bet. Of course, it’d be a lot easier if she could find someone who already shared a lot of the feelings she had about things. So you’re right in that she was lying in wait for us, just for a slightly different reason.”
“We weren’t really the soldiers she hoped we would be, were we, then. At least, I wasn’t.”
Cian was probably right. Miach clearly identified the enemy
and charged ahead all by herself. We were basically no better than deserters.
If Miach had been saved as we had been, would she be sitting here today, eating lunch with us? Would she have a smile for her former soldiers who fled the front lines? I had no idea.
It was then that I noticed Cian looking at her plate with a strangely expressionless face. It was bizarre. Like her plate was a pool, and she was watching something swim at the bottom. Her eyes remained fixed on one spot, unmoving. I was about to ask what was wrong when Cian opened her mouth, her eyes still fixed on her caprese.
“I’m sorry, Miach,” she whispered, then suddenly, her table knife was in her hand. Before I had time to wonder what she was doing, Cian had thrust the tip of the knife into her own throat.
“Ehgu,” said a strange voice from Cian’s mouth.
Summoning some strength I never would have imagined to be in her, she twisted the table knife inside her throat and brought it straight through her carotid artery and out one side. The knife couldn’t have been that sharp. Her strength was unbelievable. It was as if her neck had been a tree trunk, and she had cut halfway through it with one blow of a hatchet.
Blood sprayed from her neck.
The blood splattered all over the interior of the Italian restaurant on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building, painting the walls in patches of somber red. A shower of blood caught the server—who had just been coming to our table to fill our water glasses—directly in the face. He passed out.
It all happened in a single, endless moment. All I could do was stare. Blood flowed down onto her plate, mingling, but not blending with, the olive oil dripping down from her salad.
The other customers began to scream.
Just as, at that very moment, similar screams rose up across the globe.
Because, at that very same time, by a number of various means, 6,582 other people also tried to take their own lives.