by Project Itoh
I told her it was still going on.
“Is that so? Well, that’s where Miach was from. She was the child of a minority group there, a very small community, the admedistration official told us. Their facial features resemble ours quite a lot, and she was only eight years old when we got her, so they told us she wouldn’t have any problem getting used to our family and our way of life. All of which was very good news to us. They did mention she’d seen some pretty rough times, but that she’d gone through heavy therapy for her trauma already, and all we needed to do was provide a warm, loving home for her.”
Miach, a war orphan? I was sure she’d never said anything about that. And neither I nor Cian ever doubted she was Japanese. She spoke fluently, and though she’d had a certain exotic beauty to her features, they fit well within the margins of Japanese variation.
In the course of my work I’d had several opportunities to meet child soldiers—one of the many scenes AI social filtering kept out of the admedistration media due to a risk of trauma to viewers.
I remembered them in one of the many African countries I visited, carrying the customary AK-47s and a few M-4s from America. Children. Their country was sluggishly transitioning from an antiquated government to an admedistrative system, but there were still armed factions here and there, and the embers of conflict still smoldered.
We were at the negotiation table across from a twelve-year-old boy. A boy who happened to be the leader of an armed force 140 strong—I won’t call them “men” because they were boys too. His boys’ eyes were blank as they looked over the firepower we were offering them in exchange for their cigarettes and drugs.
Chechnya I’d never been to, but I’d heard plenty of rumors.According to the Helix inspector for the region, the military goods dealer on contract with the Geneva Convention forces there had made a mess of the place with various abuses of the law, only serving to increase the small republic’s hatred and distrust of its larger neighbors.
And Miach had been there, in the middle of that tragedy. I knew the crimes that children experienced in war zones. Now I considered the possibility that Miach had seen or experienced many of them herself. For the first time I had learned that Miach was carrying something inside her, a darkness she hadn’t told anyone—not even her coconspirators. The fact that she had come from such a hell on earth made her hatred of the admedistrative world—which must have seemed heavenly by comparison—all the more impressive.
“At first she was fine. Everything was normal. But when she got into middle school, it was like she became someone else, possessed almost. She started trying to kill herself. I told you how she attempted to cut her wrists. Well, eventually she found a way to hurt herself without anyone knowing. She came by these drugs—I don’t know where—that stopped the body’s absorption of nutrition from food. She and some of her friends made a pact that they would kill themselves that way.”
I was one of those friends.
I was that little girl who failed thirteen years ago and hadn’t forgotten it for a moment since.
I and Miach and Cian had taken those pills together in order to strike a blow against the world that had tried to suffocate us by making us too important to be lost. We wanted to hurt the world, and we were willing to hurt ourselves to do it. Well, some of us, at least.
Of course, I said nothing. All I had to do at that point to keep her talking was nod at the appropriate times and occasionally ask a suitably leading question.
“Of course, even when they took the drugs, it still looked like they were eating well. I didn’t notice anything. Nor did the parents of the other girls. By the time I did realize something was wrong, Miach had already passed the point of no return.”
The woman’s eyes fell to her lavender-scented water. “You must think I’m a terrible mother, not to realize my own child was dying before my very eyes.”
“No, not at all—”
“No, it’s all right. It’s the truth, after all.” She chewed her lip.
“But, I ask you, what can a parent do when their child does something we can’t even imagine?” Tears glistened in Reiko Mihie’s eyes. “I know that sounds like an excuse, but we really did everything we could to be good parents to her. We went to get advice from the morality center and asked for help from our admedistrative community.The community people were very kind and held several sessions on our behalf.”
Was that all you could think of? I thought, cringing inwardly. It was the usual protocol: if a kid had problems, smother them with goodwill until they no longer thought for themselves, or thought anything at all.
Miach didn’t have to do much to find herself well beyond the limitations of this woman’s small, frail imagination.
“Every time we tried a new approach, Miach seemed to just slip through our hands like sand, drifting off in some other direction. The pain she was suffering was beyond our ability—no, beyond the whole admedistration’s ability to comprehend. She was in pain for reasons we couldn’t even imagine, screaming in perfect silence.”
To be honest, I hadn’t been ready for the woman’s pained confession.
Even though, as a Helix agent, I was used to negotiating with admedistrations, the few big governments that refused to die, and the armed factions, I had no tools to deal with this kind of outpouring of raw emotion.
This was the kind of scene you expected in therapy sessions run by the admedistration community and the morality center. The world where everyone knew everything about everyone else. There was no shame in showing your emotions there. Everyone welcomed your grief with a smile and set about debating how to fix things on your behalf.A terrifying thought, I know.
That was the world I had fallen from, hard. The world from which I was estranged.
Confronted with the mother’s confession, I realized just how much of an outcast I was from Japan—no, from the entirety of the advanced admedistrative world.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t get emotional about this after so much time.”
“No, please don’t apologize.”
Miach’s mom shook her head. “I have to. My WatchMe just warned me my emotional state was beyond acceptable parameters for interfacing with others.”
“Ah, the public correctness monitoring module?”
“It’s a real lifesaver, having another pair of eyes inside me to help me through these things.”
A lifesaver, eh? Her WatchMe medicules had been monitoring her pulse and hormonal balance and noticed an aberration in her physical—and therefore mental—state, which it informed her of by sending an alert to her AR contacts. In other words, WatchMe was very subtly guiding not only her body but her mannerisms as well. It was the outsourcing of self-control. We didn’t have to worry about our own mental state if we could have something external measure everything for us. The invention of medicules had put the human body and moral precepts side by side on the same lab table.
And here this person was accepting as a perfectly natural part of her daily life the very precepts that Miach had railed against and even felt gratitude for the technology—though for all I knew, she might have secretly abhorred it. The program took signals sent from the body and transmitted morals in return. It was the kind of thing I detested with all my being.
No doubt Miach had felt much the same way.
It was one thing we shared, pure hatred toward the moral code over 80 percent of the people in the world had taken for their own.
“I was going to mention that on my way here, I thought I would stop by Miach’s grave and offer her some flowers, but I noticed she hadn’t been buried in the family plot. Based on what you’ve told me, am I right to assume that you returned her remains to Chechnya?”
The mother shook her head and, after taking a moment to compose herself
, said, “No. Miach had, on her own initiative, signed a waiver donating her remains to science. It’s not such an unusual practice since the Maelstrom.”
After that chaotic time of rampant war, cancer, and viruses, the idea that offering your body to science was one of the most admirable things a citizen could do gained wide acceptance, until it was fairly common practice to include a medical donation in your will. Even though not a single governmental law or admedistrative article enforced or even suggested it, the custom to give one’s body to science still remained a popular one.
“And you didn’t put the liquid reduction of her remains in the grave either?”
“No—we gave those to a certain university professor. And that was her wish too. Someone in that city in the Middle East, the medical bubble place they always talk about, where all the admedistrations have their research labs—”
“You mean Baghdad.”
When the nation known as the United States had been the premier global power, back at the beginning of the century, the region around Baghdad had been a festering, war-torn shambles. But now it was like a medical mecca risen from the sands, the place where every medical organization with any clout wanted to have their headquarters.
“Yes, that’s the place, Baghdad. A researcher at one of the institutions there specifically requested Miach’s remains.”
“Could you tell me who this person was?”
“Yes. His name was Mr. Kirie. Nuada Kirie.”
I had no idea why my father’s name should come up now—my father who had chosen to leave his family for the protective shell of a research laboratory. The doubts that had been troubling me flared into full-blown chaos. Of course, my years of dealing with powerful military men and gangbangers in various unstable regions had taught me not to show fear or confusion on my face, and I didn’t now.
Nuada Kirie.
Funny that he had left me and my mother behind to devote himself to his research so soon after my failed attempt to die along with Cian and Miach.
“Why, that’s your name too, isn’t it? Could he be a relative of yours?”
“Not that I’m aware of. You wouldn’t happen to have his contact information, would you?”
“Yes, well, unfortunately I’m unable to contact Mr. Kirie. Something to do with lab security.”
“You mean you gave your only daughter’s remains to someone and now you can’t contact them? Not at all?” I asked, frowning a bit exaggeratedly. It occurred to me that making a show of putting some pressure on this woman might loosen her tongue.
“No, well…” she said.
“You do have a way of contacting him.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, though I was told not to tell anyone.”
“Don’t worry. I’m an investigator for an international organization. Legally speaking, our authority exceeds that of any medical industrial body.”
“Well, Mr. Kirie has an associate here in Japan. A man by the name of Saeki.”
Keita Saeki. Another familiar name. Another person I knew.
03
“So, why were you friends with Miach, Cian?”
We were on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building, waiting for our insalata di caprese. Cian seemed surprised by my question at first. Then she was silent, a thoughtful look on her face. I decided to wait patiently for her answer. It took a while, but before too long she nodded as though she had come to some sort of decision.
“You know the thing with the drug, the one that cuts off nutrition. I was the one who ratted us out. I told my parents.”
Nothing. No anger. Our suicide pact felt like ancient history by that point, the act of three little girls thirteen years ago, bound together only by a shared hatred of the world. Years later, I could think about it pretty objectively, and I honestly couldn’t blame Cian for bailing.
“No kidding.”
“You’re not angry?”
“Come on, we were kids. It’d take way too much effort to be angry with you now.” I smiled and urged Cian to keep talking, not realizing at the time where that conversation would lead.
“Thanks.”
“I guess I should thank you. You saved my life.”
“No. I betrayed both of you. And I couldn’t save Miach.”
“You shouldn’t carry that one around with you. Don’t. I want to hear the rest of this story.”
Cian fell silent again. I figured she had a lot of pieces to put together before she could even talk about these things— things she’d probably never told a soul before now.
“See,” she said at last, “I stopped taking them, the pills. After only a day or two. I was scared. I felt myself getting thin and weak for the first time. I didn’t have WatchMe installed back then of course, none of us did, but my parents had a health consultant that put together a life plan for all of us. The medcare unit kept us in tip-top shape all the time. I mean, I’d never even had a headache at that point.”
“Same with me.”
“I guess I realized for the first time how much it could hurt to live. I could feel myself alive, and changing. I wasn’t eternal or permanent, you know? ‘This is life,’ I thought. ‘This pain is proof I’m alive.’ And when I thought that, I got so scared. I have a life, I am life.”
“I…think I know what you mean.”
“That’s why I stopped taking the pills. Of course I couldn’t tell you or Miach. Which meant I couldn’t tell anyone. By the time I realized I had to and went to my parents, it was already too late.”
Tears were forming in Cian’s eyes. Thirteen years. For thirteen years she’d held all of this inside. How hard that must have been. It wasn’t the kind of thing a session or two of therapy could make right.
“Hey, it’s not your fault, Cian.”
“I know that. I mean, I should know that. But I don’t.”
“Well, it should be enough to know that there’s at least one person who’s grateful you did what you did, and she’s sitting right here. Believe me, I’m glad I’m still alive.”
“Heh. Okay. Thanks.”
“Maybe we should talk about something else.”
I was starting to worry. Everything I’d said was the truth. I really was grateful to Cian. I was still alive thanks to her, and being alive meant I could still hurt myself with cigars and tobacco and alcohol. Not that I could say any of that in public.
“No, it’s okay. I want to talk about this.” Cian wiped away a stray tear and took a deep breath to steady herself. “Looking back on it now, I think I felt like I had to be with Miach. That’s why I hung out with her.”
“Had to be?”
“It’s like, I thought of myself as a counterbalance. I was having a tough time with the world back then too, just like you and Miach. I felt suffocated all the time, like I didn’t have a place to go. There was just too much, I don’t know, love in the world, and it was strangling me. They kept telling me what an important resource I was to society and I kept thinking ‘No, I’m not. How could that possibly be true?’”
“That’s what Miach always said, wasn’t it. ‘We aren’t resources! We have to prove we don’t have any value at all!’”
Cian nodded. “Yeah, and I agreed with her, I really did— but I didn’t think that meant we had to kill somebody or die ourselves. For all that Miach and I saw eye to eye, I couldn’t follow her all the way to that conclusion. But when I looked at Miach, I knew she could. I knew she’d go right up to the edge.”
“So you thought you would balance that. I get it.”
“That’s right. I thought if I was there with her, I could hold her back. I could keep Miach from going too far. I would just listen to everything she said, and nod, and agree, and it would be enough for her just to have an audience, you know? She wouldn’t actually have to do any of the things she always talked about. Of course, it didn’t work out like that. In the end I was just a coward, and Miach was dead.”
I felt like I had, for the first time, touched a little of the pain this woman must have carried inside her for the last thirteen years. I think I know what you mean, I’d told her. I didn’t know shit. The pain Cian had carried was deep, harsh, and she had carried it all alone for more than a decade.
Cian hadn’t been a hanger-on. I’d had her all wrong. She had been stronger than any of us, and more noble, and more alone. All alone.
Miach and I, we were little girls, but Cian Reikado had been an adult.
“That’s amazing, Cian. I could never have been that strong.”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t strong. I was too scared to do anything else.”
Cian leaned back, the view from the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building stretching out behind her, as the waiter arrived carrying sliced tomatoes and mozzarella cheese on two white plates.
“Caprese’s here,” Cian said. “It’s been a long time since we ate together.”
≡
They closed the lid on Cian’s coffin while the procession watched.
As was the custom, the family had chosen a gentle, light pink for the coffin. Like they could paint over the horrible, illogical shock of losing someone so abruptly in an age when everyone was supposed to live forever. Most of the people in the procession wore light yellow and emerald green in mourning. The ceremony had been brief. Cian’s cold body would now be carried by hearse to the local reduction facility. I watched the family procession leave the community center. I had no desire to go to the factory. I didn’t think I’d be able to stand there and wait for the reduction process to finish. I was out of time as it was. I had to figure out why Cian had died before they dragged me off to therapy.