by Project Itoh
The factory, the melting pot, the reduction center.
It was a relic from the time of the mutant viruses after the nukes dropped.
The bodies of the dead were reduced with a protein liquefier, and the resulting goop was further processed to remove any possibility of viral or bacterial transmission. The processing plant of the dead. A reminder of more chaotic times that had lived on for over half a century now. From a law-enforcement perspective, it was a pain in the ass. You couldn’t use medicules to analyze someone’s brain once it’d been liquefied.
Back during the Maelstrom, when mutant plagues ran rampant, corpses were nothing more than disease vectors to be eliminated as quickly as possible. Corpses started new outbreaks, and merely scorching the flesh wasn’t enough. The custom that arose under those conditions became the norm, which meant that bodies these days were dealt with as soon as possible. After an extremely brief autopsy to determine cause of death, the body would be subjected to protein reduction and that was it.
While it was still possible to use imaging to examine a corpse after the fact, there was no time to use medicules to investigate anything on the nano level.
“Goodbye, Cian. And thank you,” I muttered toward the hearse as it drove away from the funeral home. A soft breeze against my face was Cian’s answer. I felt like crying for a little while after that, but I stood and watched the car until I could no longer see it. Our friend. She had watched over us. She had saved my life. And she had suffered for it for years.
Maybe she was the kind of comrade-in-arms Miach had been looking for.
To me, Cian Reikado had been a friend.
A little girl, braver than any of us, and more of an adult than I would ever be.
I wiped away a tear with the back of my hand and left the funeral home to go to the university where Keita Saeki worked. While Nuada Kirie, aka my father, had gone off to Baghdad, his partner had remained behind to continue his research here in Japan. He was still at the same school where he and my father had worked together on their medicule theories so many years before.
≡
I parked my car in the university lot and touched my hand to the screen of a FindYou on the way into the school (the granite base that the screen sat on gave it a nice academic look) and announced I was looking for Keita Saeki. The message searching appeared in the middle of the screen as the FindYou hunted for Keita’s WatchMe signal. After a moment, the lab and a map showing how to get there rose up on the screen. I touched the display to transfer the map to my own AR, and willfully ignoring the looks that my crimson Helix agent uniform got from the students, I followed the bobbing arrows that appeared in the air in front of me toward the laboratory.
Past a row of evergreens with pink leaves I found the building I was looking for. I pressed a finger to the door to identify myself and made for the laboratory.
“Come on in, I’ve been waiting for you,” came a familiar voice from inside. Of course, when I’d asked the FindYou to locate him, it let Keita Saeki know (as was his legal right) that I was looking for him. I strode through the door into the cluttered office.
“Wow, what a mess.”
The place was a mountain of printouts—manuscripts and research materials and the like. There were mounds of other dead media too. The thin black squares I recognized as floppy disks. “They’re like memorycels,” he had told me once when I had visited the laboratory as a child. As for the other things there, I had no idea what they might be called. Just looking at them, it was hard to even imagine what they might do.
“I’m surprised you can even walk around in here,” I said, making a show of hopping from bare spot to bare spot, going toward the professor like someone jumping from rock to rock across a river.
“I manage. Besides, ThingList remembers where I put everything if I ever need to find it,” the professor replied as he scratched his tangled monkey-puzzle-tree of a hairdo with one hand.
“It’s not a question of practicality. It’s a question of mental hygiene.”
“For scientists it’s always a question of need, Miss Kirie. As long as my ThingList has location tags, and it does, there’s no need for me to remember where anything is. I can just follow the arrows.”
“ThingList is a bad influence.”
“I like to think of it as outsourcing my memory to someone far more competent. I use a NeedList inside my ThingList so I don’t forget anything when I go out either.”
“Well, I spend a lot of time off-line, so that wouldn’t work for me.”
“Where’s that thesis?” Keita addressed the room. “The one that Czech mathematician wrote three years ago.” A long, pink, rubbery appendage extended from the intelligent material on the ceiling, moved about thirty feet across the room, then grew fingers to fish several sheets of a printout from a large stack, which it then brought to us. Everything in the room was tagged for identification and immediate retrieval—which meant that somewhere on the university server there was a perfect real-time replica of the professor’s office. No wonder the human race was growing soft.
I stood next to the professor and a gelatin seat materialized from the floor beneath me.
“Care for some water?”
“Got any caffeine?”
“Nah. The university—that is the student admedistration— won’t allow it. I’m surprised how well this generation looks after itself.”
“Wasn’t it your generation that wanted society to be this way?”
“Now now, how could anyone have predicted such an extremely health-conscious society would rise out of what we had before? Yo, two waters please.”
Once again the arm extended from the ceiling, pouring water into two cups and carrying them to us.
“There are many from our generation that can’t bear to fit into the molds society stamps for them,” I told him. “Plenty of people in your generation too, for that matter.”
“Give birth, consume. That’s the safe, stable cycle of life. Those who would attempt to destroy themselves, and thereby destroy that cycle, are anathema to the rest of us. Before they are allowed to do such a thing, it is our responsibility to notice the telltale signs and subject them to heavy therapy. That’s what being a thoughtful society means.”
“Don’t you think we’ve reached the limits of our over-considerate society by now?”
“What we’ve reached is a healthy, conflict-free status quo. Though the statistical rise in suicides within admedistrative society is troubling for sure, there are many who believe that pharmaceuticals and the development of novel therapeutic treatments, as well as the legal support for such treatments, will eventually bring the trend under control.”
“You seem well, professor.”
“Show me someone who doesn’t. With disease virtually abolished, it shouldn’t be hard. A lot of old expressions have lost their teeth that way, you know.”
Colds.
Migraines.
Infectious diseases.
I wondered how much pain I would have to feel before I could truly prove I existed. That I felt pain. That I was satisfied.
Cian had felt pain, and it terrified her.
She was frightened of being an undeniably living creature, with a nervous system and the whole works.
It went a little differently for the elderly. Life span was a hard out and an undeniable barrier. The older you got, the more you experienced that balance between life and death, and the more you began to fall apart, beyond the abilities of WatchMe and a medcare unit to catch up.
“Speaking of losing teeth, you can’t say that a feeble old man has no health problems,” I challenged him.
“True enough. There is no panacea for old age, I’ll give you that. But you have to agree those little buggers your dad and I cooked up are doing one hell of a job.”
“Well, for a world without disease, people sure do spend a lot of time gabbing about their health.”
The professor shrug
ged his shoulders as if to say it’s no fault of mine. He moved dexterously for a man in his mid-eighties.
“That’s because everyone’s still afraid that all it will take is one misstep and the cancers and viruses will be right back on us.”
“It’s already been half a century since the Maelstrom.”
“And the people who had to live through that—myself included—have control of the admedistrations. Plenty of councilors and commissioners are in their seventies and eighties. That chaos and the nuclear war that followed made our world a very harsh environment. The kind of place where you’d die without a space suit on. It was like living in a space station, one thin wall away from oblivion. The nuclear war and the radiation it spread made the perpetuation of our species a very dicey proposition, which it still would be without the help of homeostatic monitoring thanks to WatchMe and constant treatment by a medcare unit. You need strong armor to live in a harsh world.”
“So, even though the radiation’s gone, the fear remains?”
“Well, there’s a lot to be said for socialistic tendencies. Did you know that the first group to attempt the nationwide eradication of cancer and the prohibition of smoking were the Nazis?”
Fleeting memories of twentieth century history as taught in school.
With the Maelstrom waiting at the end of the semester, the sorry fate of the twentieth century Jews got sidelined in class. The longer history got, the more compressed its parts became.
“We’ll be lucky if we get one minute’s time,” Miach had said once. Leave it to Miach to imagine a history lesson one thousand years in the future. And who wouldn’t want to skip such an uneventful period in favor of something more exciting? As history marched on, our time would shrink, and shrink, and shrink away until finally there’d be nothing left.
The tragic genocide of the Jews was hanging on, tooth and nail, to its two minutes in class.
“They’re the lot who killed all those Jews, right?”
“You make them sound like rabble. They were a nation. Democratic in origin, with citizens, and voting, and a representative government. The Nazis took control over the details of daily life to a greater extent than anyone before them. They made a register of all cancer patients, listing all who had been affected, categorizing and analyzing them, all in the first organized attempt to eradicate cancer in history.”
“Fascism, was it? The political system in Germany under the Nazis, I mean.”
“Yes, and you can draw clear parallels between our admedistrative system and the health policies of the Nazis, if you like. Were you aware that pejorative words like fatty dropped from our language over the last half century?”
“Actually, I did know that one.” I chuckled. Miach Mihie, banzai!
“Under Nazi rule, the ‘crippled’ became the ‘physically impaired.’ Lunatic asylums became psychiatric hospitals. Countless words pertaining to the human body changed in subtle ways.”
“What’s lunatic mean?”
“Think of it as a not-very-nice way to refer to someone in serious need of high-level counseling and deep therapy. The Nazis also spearheaded the first nationwide attempt to stamp out smoking because of its detrimental effects on health. In 1939, the Nazi government established a regulatory agency for alcohol and tobacco products. In 1941, a research laboratory to study the harmful effects of tobacco was established at the Universität Wien under the auspices of Hitler himself.”
“You make it sound like the Nazis were a bunch of dogooders.”
With these cherry-picked examples, Nazi society didn’t sound all that different from ours. Which meant that now I had a personal reason to hate the Nazis as the forebears of the assholes who wouldn’t let me smoke today.
“In a sense, that’s true. Even if they were responsible for the greatest genocide of the twentieth century. There are many sides to everything, that’s the point. Take a clean freak and turn them up a few notches, whammo, they’re talking about racial purity.‘Tobacco is the source of all ills, a danger to the nation’s citizens.’That’s a protoform of what we call resource awareness today.”
I shrugged. “So we’ve just reinvented Nazi Germany on a global scale then. Great.”
“In a sense, yes, we have. Though there are significant differences. Foremost among them is that, in the time of the Nazis, it was the Nazi party and a few scientists who were pushing eugenics as a way to clean things up. In admedistrative society, everyone’s out there together, waving the same flag. We are all health freaks. The Nazis might have had the idea long before us, but not even they could keep their own soldiers on the front lines from smoking—especially in the harsher places like the Eastern Front.”
“Oh, I understand that. I really understand that.” I chuckled. Of course, for me it worked the other way around. It wasn’t battlefield conditions that made me smoke. It was the smokes that lured me out to the battlefield. I wondered for the first time what had become of Étienne and the others who used to partake in our contraband exchanges. For a moment, I was transported back to the sunflower fields and blue skies of the Sahara, dotted with the indigo veils of the Kel Tamasheq.
“But now tobacco’s gone from the world. Save for a few holdouts in Africa and parts of Asia—conflict zones, mostly. Go to any admedistration and you’ll not find a single constituent partaking of either cigarettes or alcohol. The same goes without saying for harder drugs. Do you know why drugs were prohibited in the first place, way back when?”
“Enlighten me.”
“It started back during the settlement of North America. The slaves and laborers brought in from Africa and China had a custom of chewing on coca leaves, which enabled them to work far beyond the usual limits of their physical bodies. Of course, this didn’t amuse the white laborers who weren’t partaking. By abolishing drugs for moral reasons, they attempted to wrest the title of top laborers from so-called inferior races.”
“That’s funny. I always thought it was because drugs ruined people’s lives.”
“Well, that’s true too, but that’s only one aspect of the truth.” The professor leaned back in his chair. “Of course, my generation is blessed and cursed with having seen the reasons why our current health-obsessed society needs to be what it is. And I’m sure you had to sit through your share of lessons on the Maelstrom when you were in school, Tuan.”
The section of history class dealing with the Maelstrom was a curriculum heavyweight. Thinking back on it, it occurred to me that history had always been Miach’s favorite subject—the only one she was truly passionate about—and the Maelstrom was her favorite part of that.
I had never been much interested in history class, even though we were always happy to receive Miach’s gleanings of wisdom from the same.
Hey, Tuan, you know what?
A whole ten million people died during just a few years in North America… “
That’s mostly because the people writing your textbooks were just the right age to remember the Maelstrom with fear,”Professor Saeki went on. “There were riots all over America—the strongest and wealthiest nation in the world at the time—that touched every corner of the land. A lot of racial cleansing too. Hispanics, Koreans, Africans—everyone was a target. The killing was so frenzied you would think everyone in the country had been born with an organ specifically designed for massacring people who didn’t look like them. So ethnicity killed ethnicity, and the chaos spread to other countries, until the terrorists decided to start lobbing the nukes they’d stolen, and everything went to hell. Our current benevolent society is a reaction to that. Some people might find the air a bit stifling, but it’s a sight better than falling into chaos like the Maelstrom again. After all, no one wants to see themselves and their children die, and what we have now is far preferable to the past, when a few men in smoke-filled rooms had all the power.”
“I’m glad we’ve learned how to tame each other, then. It’s like we’re all one another’s pets, isn’t it.”
“Always a cynic
. Look, when people experience something really extreme, it’s very difficult for them to find balance after that. Their reaction usually points in an equally extreme opposite direction. That’s how we got our lifeist society. I agree, we’ve gone overboard for sure. It’s a bit silly to keep a piggy bank around when your wallet’s always full—but you wouldn’t know what a piggy bank is, would you, Tuan?”
I tried to keep from laughing out loud and only mostly succeeded.
The professor raised an eyebrow at me. “Something funny?”
“No, I was just remembering having heard a friend use that expression a long time ago.”
“You don’t say.” The professor shrugged. “Whatever, I’m sure you didn’t come here to learn about antiquated idiomatic expressions. What do you want to know, Tuan? When a WHO agent comes calling, it’s usually something important.”
“Miach Mihie.”
It was quick, but I didn’t miss the look of alarm that passed across Professor Saeki’s eyes. He put one hand to his mouth and looked thoughtful. “Hmm, yes. I received her body on Nuada’s behalf.”
“Where is my father?”
“A good question. Neither of us have tried contacting each other for quite some time.”
I decided I would press the attack. “My father took Miach along with him to Baghdad, didn’t he?”
The professor waved his hand as if to suggest this was not a fruitful line of questioning. The old man’s guard was up, I could tell.
“Where is my father? Is he not in Baghdad?”
The professor shook his head and sighed. “If he’s not in Baghdad, then your guess is as good as mine. Why not ask the global FindYou?”
“I did. Apparently, he’s no longer on the planet.”
He cocked his head. “What do you suppose that means?”
“I didn’t get a single hit from a search. Nor is he on any of the death records of any admedistration. He might’ve turned off the location signal on his WatchMe, but even then I’d still get a hit—I just wouldn’t know where he was.”