Harmony

by Project Itoh

  Again his field of vision lowered as he stepped down and began to walk through the house toward the bathroom. (I wonder what he’s up to?) I watched him turn on the water, then everything went dark as he closed his eyelids. (He’s washing his face.) When he next opened his eyes, Ichiro Tokume was wiping his face with a towel. I caught a glimpse of his expression in the mirror for only a moment.

  Not a trace of emotion.

  Empty eyes, open mouth. Three empty holes.

  Back to the living room. The noose was swaying gently from the ceiling. As he stepped up onto the stool he looked down at his feet, then back up. The noose encircled my field of vision and then was gone, around Ichiro Tokume’s neck. My field of vision shook violently.

  Now we were swaying back and forth, looking out at the living room interior. A soft-pink sofa. A screen on one wall. Intelligent wall material made to look like plaster. We turned a full circle around the pivot of the rope, as though Ichiro wanted me to see where he lived with his wife. Everything was recorded.

  Come in, come see my home!

  This is the living room. This is where I hang myself.

  Of course, I was merely watching what his AR contact lenses had recorded. Ichiro Tokume, age thirty-eight, had expired when the full weight of his body had pulled at the vertebrae in his neck. If I’d wanted to, I could have watched the feed until his body stopped providing its electrical current to the lenses and it went dark—a nice natural stopping point to the record of his last few minutes on earth.

 

  First-person POV suicide flicks.

  Of the 6,582 cases, 2,049 had been wearing AR contact lenses when they did the deed. The last things they saw remained on the server, giving us close-up front-row seats to their deaths.

  AR contacts monitor focus points, and I wanted to see what Ichiro Tokume had been looking at. A cursor blipped around the screen, highlighting wherever his eyes went. The objects and angle of view were then listed up and run through several formulas to analyze Mr. Tokume’s mental state in the ten minutes leading up to lights out. The results, displayed in bold on another screen, were nothing surprising.

  Severe depressive tendencies.

  Suicidal tendencies.

  I decided to watch a hundred more similar movies at 3x speed. Each was about twelve minutes long. Divided by three times one hundred equaled four hundred minutes.

  I plugged in the commands and sat back, for just under seven hours, to watch the deaths of one hundred people randomly selected from 2,049, back to back.

  My database of suicide movies.

  I couldn’t imagine anything other than a mass, unexplained suicide requiring the creation of such a morbid collection.

  Each person in the database had only ten minutes’ worth of footage, the reason being that all had taken action so swiftly. It was like each of them had parents who had told them to never put off for tomorrow what could be done today, and they listened. The logger in Canada had been cutting through a particularly large pine tree when he suddenly pulled out the chain saw and cut through his own neck. I watched his field of vision lurch, then fall until it was rolling across a bed of matted decaying leaves.

  The scene changed to the next victim.

 

  I was looking at my own face, from another time and place. My breath stopped.

  Mirror, mirror, on the wall.

  She had been among a random selection of a hundred victims.

  I was staring at me. A dead person was staring at me.

  I looked at myself, Tuan Kirie, through the eyes of my friend who, in a matter of minutes, would stick a table knife through her own throat and paint the walls of the restaurant with her blood.

 

 

  My face. Skin tanned a little by the ultraviolet rays of the Sahara.

  What a grotesque mirror.

  The Italian restaurant on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building.

  The field of vision went from my face down to the bright red and fresh white slices on her plate—the insalata we’d both ordered. I noticed everything was moving at normal speed and realized I must have flicked off the fast forward without even realizing it. The cursor told me Cian was focusing on the red slices of tomato and brilliant white slices of mozzarella layered atop them.

 

  “I’m sorry, Miach.”

 

  That was what Cian would be saying any second now.

  I heard the words moments after anticipating them.

  Cian’s attention shifted to the table mats, and I saw her healthy arm and hand, neither fat nor slim, slide into view. The hand grabbed the knife to the right of her dish, gripping the handle with the blade pointing down, while I stared. A waiter walked up to fill my glass of water—

 

  I switched off the AR.

 

 

 

 

  My lungs were screaming for air, my brain for oxygen. I had forgotten to start breathing again.

  The sound of my heaving breaths filled the conference room of the WHO Japan branch I was using for my little viewing session.

  Thankfully, I was alone in the room. I had been the only Helix agent in Japan when the event occurred, which was lucky for me. This way I wouldn’t be obliged to cooperate with any other agents.

  Maybe I should go in for immediate therapy. Maybe I should go to some emergency morality center with white cotton walls to escape from the words that had spilled from Cian’s mouth.

  Calm down. Steady breaths.

  Don’t you want to find out why Cian died? Didn’t you blackmail your boss just for a chance to find out what your friend’s last words meant? So you saw yourself looking at your friend just before she died, so what? You’re breathing heavy just because you remembered a few words?

  I’m sorry, Miach.

  And then something occurred to me.

  Of my one hundred randomly chosen victims, Cian had been the only one to say something as she died. Why was she the only one to leave last words? Were those even “last words,” as we like to think of them, or just something she happened to say? My selection had been truly random, and while it had been just a coincidence that Cian’s name was on the list, I found it hard to believe that the other ninety-nine people’s not saying anything before committing suicide, or even leaving a note, had also been a coincidence.

  “Go through all the records and pull out just the ones containing the subject’s voice,” I told the database. This got me a few results, all mundane snippets of daily conversation with family or friends, none of which seemed connected in any way to the optimal methods of suicide they were about to employ.

  I’m sorry, Miach.

  Which left Cian Reikado as the exception. The only one with something to say.

  That something being the name of the girl who had died, leaving us cowardly deserters behind.

  ≡

  I had returned to that place Miach called the “suburb of the soul.” Back to an endless, boring future of connected blocks, their nanomaterial plaster walls painted in light pastels.

  I took an automag from the hotel. I didn’t care to experience the horror of the subway again, nor did I feel like going back to my own home. I was here to visit Miach Mihie’s parents.

  I’m sorry, Miach.

  I couldn’t exactly go to the police or Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg and tell them that the trigger for 6,582 people across the world taking their lives had been those words—words important only to myself, Cian, and Miach. They wouldn’t believe me.In fact, they’d probably recommend me for immediate therapy.

  I wasn’t sure I would be able to explain why I was going to find Miach’s parents. Certainly not because one of 6,582 people had mentioned her name before committing suicide.

  Truth be told, I didn’t really believe me either. I had come here on the strength of a clue you c
ould barely call a clue, a gut feeling that was hardly reliable enough to call a gut feeling, and an emotion that was something like fear—fear of the ghost of Miach Mihie. In a world where everything was public property, my reason was so private it was almost lewd.

  Through the lens of AR, everyone in the world wore their

 

 

 

 

 

 

  on their sleeve. Focus for any amount of time on someone you saw in the street, and a box of data would appear by their head, telling you everything you could possibly want to know about them. In lifeist society, where it was considered a moral obligation to reveal personal information, especially that concerning one’s health, the very word private had the illicit stench of secrecy to it.

  ≡

  So it was that I found myself on a solo investigation, using the authority granted me by the Geneva Convention as a Helix agent to the fullest extent. Miach Mihie’s parents had moved several months after their daughter died, but it did not take me long to track down their new residence.

  The neighborhood was one of those admedistration collectives with security cameras monitoring all passersby. At the entrance to the zone, you had to switch from whatever mode of transport you had used to get there to a collective-provided magcar. I stepped out of the car and walked up to the front door of the house, then pressed my index finger to the fingerplate.

 

  “Hey, Tuan, did you know that people used to hit doors with their hands?”

  Miach’s voice in my memory.

  “There used to be no way to tell who was standing outside your door at all. Some people installed little fisheye lenses on their doors, but that was about the limit of the technology. Not that being in the dark about the people around you was any big deal back then—there weren’t ubiquitous personal information displays all the time half a century ago. These days, you just touch the plate on the door and all your info is posted to the AR of the person inside on their wall or something, but they didn’t have any way of doing that before.”

  “So they just hit the door? That’s so, I don’t know, primitive,” Cian said.

  “It was the easiest way to announce their presence to whoever was inside. They called it ‘knocking.’ You used your knuckles, like this.” Miach demonstrated on the classroom wall. “When a person inside heard the knocking, they would shout out ‘Who is it?’ and the person on the outside would shout back ‘It’s so-and-so from such-and-such.’ And the person inside just had to take them at their word. So, if you think about it, every time you opened your door, you were taking a little risk.”

  Cian and I nodded enthusiastically, starry-eyed at the seemingly limitless font of knowledge that was Miach Mihie.

  “But you got to think people are getting tired of this telling-everyone-who-they-are-all-the-time business. What a drag it is to have to show you’re healthy and you’re taking care of yourself all the time. We’re tired of it, right? People shouldn’t have to walk around with labels over their heads, proving every minute and every second exactly who they are to the world.”

  “Say, Tuan—”

  Another memory.

  “You know privacy didn’t used to be such a naughty word.”

  I shook my head, eyes flitting around the room. I couldn’t believe she had just said that word here in class, in the middle of the day.

  Not that Miach ever cared who heard her proclamations.

  “It was because,” she continued, oblivious, “information about yourself used to be available only to yourself and a few others. That’s what privacy meant. But now, everything that used to be private is public, so the only thing ‘private’ these days is sex. Now, why do you think that happened, Cian?”

  Cian shrugged her shoulders.

  For some reason, a light went off in my head at that moment. “It’s like we’ve offered ourselves to the rest of the world as hostages to guarantee our own good behavior,” I said eagerly.

  Miach smiled. “That’s right, Tuan, it’s just like that.”

  I remember feeling a little elation at having said something to please her.

  “It’s just like Tuan says. By letting everyone else know every little detail about ourselves, we’re making sure we can’t get away with anything. Give up your erratic free will as a hostage to everyone else in society and you’re guaranteed to keep things safe and peaceful.”

  This was how Miach dispensed wisdom, little by little, to us little girls in the corner of a classroom, explaining to us exactly why we were so frustrated and why we felt like we didn’t belong.

  Thinking back on it now, I’m amazed it never occurred to me at the time to wonder what sort of people Miach’s parents were. I had never met them, and I didn’t remember Miach ever talking about them.

  Eventually, I had told Miach who my dad was, that he had written the thesis that led to WatchMe, that he had contributed significantly to the world we despised.

  All Miach had said was “huh.”

  She hadn’t lost it. She hadn’t hated me. She had hardly reacted at all.

 

  Now I found I really was curious what kind of parents it took to raise a girl who could smile while she daydreamed out loud about using a household medcare unit to kill fifty thousand people. I removed my finger from the plate and waited quietly for an answer.

  “Might I ask what sort of business a member of an international organization has with us?” the door said, breaking the silence and snapping me out of my reverie fully back into the present.

  “I’m with the Helix Inspection Agency—I suppose you saw that from my ID. We’re an investigative branch of WHO. I was hoping I could talk to you for a moment concerning the multiple suicides in the Sukunabikona Conclave yesterday.”

  The door opened and a woman emerged. She looked to be in her late fifties. It was Reiko Mihie, Miach’s mother.

 

  Her face held none of Miach’s twisted willfulness, that “dark illumination” for lack of a better term—none of her eccentric vitality. Instead, her face was like that of every other admedistration member, like the people I had seen on the subway upon my return to Japan. They were healthy but lifeless, if that made any sense. Compared to the Kel Tamasheq whose bodies, wrapped in indigo, practically shimmered with a vitality that sprang from their deep history, the people living in this country were like walking corpses.

  That’s progress, said the Miach Mihie living inside me.The more advanced a people became, the closer they grew to death.

 

  “Of course I’m happy to help in any way that I can. I’m just not sure what that would be.”

  “I wanted to ask you about your daughter, Miach.”

  A cloud passed over Reiko’s face. I saw confusion in her eyes.

  “My daughter has been gone—dead—for more than ten years now. I’m sorry, but I don’t see the connection.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of this,” I said, marveling that this woman didn’t appear to remember her daughter’s friend, or that I had taken an oath to kill myself with her. That I had been one of three foolish little girls.

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about your daughter before her death.”

  The mother’s eyes dropped like she was scanning the depths of her memory, looking for something she’d lost a long time ago. “Well, this is hardly a pleasant story, but when my daughter was a child, she often tried to take her own life. She slashed her wrists on several occasions.”

  “I’m aware of that too. It’s in our records,” I lied.

  Reiko, I was there with her. I would have followed her all theway down to hell. “I’m also aware,” I said, “that she tried to kill herself by eating too much, and then by not eating at all. As though she were trying to damage her own precious body precisely because it was so precious.” />
  From the woman’s expression I knew I had hit the mark. And it was true. We had tried to die because they told us our bodies were a public resource, because they kept telling us our bodies didn’t belong to us.

  “We loved her, truly we did. We wanted her to grow up healthy, to make a contribution to society. But we failed. She was always cleverer than we were by far, and stronger, and yet, at the same time, fragile—a delicate little girl.”

  “So what happened?”

  “It’s kind of a long story. Maybe you should come inside,” Reiko said, drawing away from the door. She led me into an extremely average living room, motioned for me to sit on a sofa, and disappeared into the kitchen, asking as she went if I liked the smell of lavender. I made some noncommittal grunts, not really having an opinion on the subject.

  “Here,” she said upon her return and handed me a glass of water. I took it. It did smell like lavender. This was a recent trend—using your medcare unit to add scents to drinking water. It probably had something to do with the whole aromatherapy concept that smells could help generate a feeling of calm.

  A good 80 percent of admedistrative society was this: pastel pink buildings and lavender scents.

  “So, you tried to help her, and what happened?” I asked Reiko as she sat down across from me. The woman who had once been Miach’s mother—I suppose that technically she still was—turned her eyes toward the twisted branches of a palmetto growing outside the window.

  “Miach was adopted. Maybe you remember the admedistration campaign to adopt war orphans to counterbalance the problem of our aging society? There were those posters: ‘The best resource of all is our youth.’ We had tried to have a child of our own, but I was told by the doctor that my body couldn’t produce children. When my husband and I imagined the long lives ahead of us, thanks to WatchMe, just years of gradually growing old, it seemed so…flat, so homogeneous. How horrible, we thought, and how sad. Maybe you remember the conflict in Chechnya?”