One thing the declaration achieved was to make everyone in the world shut up for a moment. What were you doing when you heard it?
It was cloudy in this city that day. This city being the capital of Japan.
The clouds hung heavy, gray lumps in the sky over the city, waiting to crush the people who braved the streets. Or maybe I was seeing symbolism in everything due to shock.
Reports said some people got sick just hearing it. Many more reported for immediate therapy. When I heard it, I was in my car driving toward the airport with a passenger—the man with the business cards.
“Ever heard of a business card?”
We were sitting in the classroom during recess time when Miach showed us a small piece of paper.
It was rectangular, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and there were words on it: our school name, our class number, and in larger text below that, Miach Mihie.
“Check it out. People used to use these to introduce themselves.”
Cian grunted with interest and leaned forward to look at the paper where it lay atop Miach’s desk.
“Can’t write much of a profile on that little thing, can you?”
Miach nodded. “That’s right. And there’s no link to your SA score or medical info either. The main social unit back in the day used to be your company or school, so you wrote that address here on the card. In fact, most people didn’t even use business cards outside of company interactions. There was no need or means to display personal information at other times.”
“Why not?”
“Because privacy was so important back then.”
“Privacy?” Cian giggled. “Miach, you dog!”
“They didn’t have AR like we do, y’know. There were physical limitations to how much information you could get out there.”
“That’s true,” I said, adding so that Cian could understand, “You would’ve had to walk around with a big sign around your neck if you wanted to do what we do today.”
Cian frowned. “But don’t people kind of roll their eyes at you if you don’t display your creds? Was everyone just shadier back then? And, like, suspicious of each other?”
“No, it’s just that you didn’t share your personal information with people like you do now. If you were out in public and someone sat down next to you, you didn’t pay them any attention. Business cards were for when you were obliged to exchange some limited amount of information, and you had to give them to someone else by hand, so it was more targeted than the indiscriminate spray of information we have now.”
“It’s kind of cute,” I said, picking up the little scrap of paper.
Miach grinned. “Isn’t it? I think it’s way more cute and classy than some AR profile hanging over your head. I knew you’d like it, Tuan.”
“Neat, it’s even got a picture!” Cian said, pointing at the colorful illustration on the card. “Did you draw that, Miach? What is it, some kind of symbol?”
“Yeah. It’s our symbol.”
“Our symbol?”
“Yeah. For our trio of comrades. You, me, and Tuan.”
I still had the handmade business card Miach had given me that day in my desk at home. In fact, knowing what a business card was had come in handy once or twice in my work as a Helix agent. I realized that this ancient form of information transfer, completely lost from lifeist society, was still highly valued in negotiations between old-style governments and nations. The Helix agent charged with negotiating cease-fires between the many armed groups in Chechnya and the government in Russia told me that once when he’d produced a business card during a sit-down with one armed group, they’d immediately warmed to him. In places where AR wasn’t yet a part of daily life, the culture of business cards still thrived.
I was remembering all this because of the man who ran up to me in the university parking lot as I was getting into my car and handed me his card.
“Agent Elijah Vashlov, Interpol.”
I took the card from his hand with practiced ease. Agent Vashlov’s eyes widened. “You know what that is?”
“It’s not a business card?”
I glanced at the paper. There was nothing cute about a business card received from a strange man who ran up to you in a parking lot. Nothing cute at all. Besides, with a clear AR display showing me who the guy was anyway, there was no need for business cards, which made this all just a parlor trick.
“I’m familiar with the old custom.”
“Oh, well that’s no fun.”
“I hope you don’t do that to everyone you meet.”
“Actually,” he replied, “I do. Most of them rather like it.”
Vashlov scratched his head sheepishly. He was clearly fond of performance. I asked him what his business was. I’m not made of time, you know.
“How about we talk in your car. We can just drive around.”
“Sorry, but I’m on my way to the airport.” I indicated my car with a jab of my jaw.
“Off to Baghdad, right?”
I stared into the man’s eyes, taking care to hide my surprise. His face betrayed no emotion, though it was clear he’d been trying to catch me off my guard, which meant I was irritating him. That made me glad.
“That’s just what I want to talk to you about,” Vashlov said, his words cool and measured. “Just let me go with you and talk to you on the way to the airport. That’s all I ask. I won’t slow you down.”
After a moment’s hesitation I nodded, and Vashlov told his own car to go home on its own. I got in and set the route, which brought up a display of the predicted time it would take to get to the airport.
“You’ve got one hour,” I told him.
“More than enough,” Vashlov said, getting in next to me.
Something didn’t feel right as we drove through the city streets. Maybe it was the heavy clouds overhead, but something seemed to have added a generous dollop of loneliness to the flat landscape of the city. I stared out the window, trying to dig the source of that loneliness out of the passing scenery with my eyes. I was no more enlightened by the time the car reached the entrance to the expressway and we left the streets behind.
Even the expressway seemed unusually vacant that day. Whatis it? I wondered.
It’s you. You’re lonely, the loneliness answered me.
“With this little traffic, we might get there early,” Vashlov said. Then more quietly he added, “They’re all afraid, you know.”
“Of what?”
“Of someone dying right in front of their eyes. Afraid it might be them.”
That made sense.
I’d heard the therapists were overwhelmed.
How could someone just die, right in front of you?
Forced belief in others was what kept our society running. That was what it meant to take a little bit of everyone around you hostage. In exchange for lives that, save for rare accidents, would never end before their time, we were expected to always keep personal information on display, to participate in admedistration discussions and morality sessions, and to make decisions only after receiving advice from the appropriate expert.
But the gears in the clockwork had warped a little bit after the suicides. Though it had happened in a strange way, the “incident” as people were calling it had reminded them of an old familiar feeling—that others were strangers. That they were unpredictable and often distasteful.
True enough. If normally stable people were capable of committing suicide at the drop of a hat, it was impossible to know whom you could trust. What would happen if they took their own lives the very moment you did decide to trust them? What would that do to you?
I knew what it had done to me. Eternity had crumbled.
We all knew that people were supposed to live for a hundred some-odd years, without ever getting sick or seeing anything troubling. The world was supposed to be a gentle place. A safe place.
The illusion had just been smashed to pieces.
What would happen next?
Perhaps imprudently, I was wondering that too. Surely, the suicides hadn’t been the end of it. This had to be part of somebody’s plan—maybe even a still-alive Miach Mihie’s plan. The ones who had committed suicide were simply the first sacrifices that had to be made so that the plan could be put into action.
“Aren’t you scared?” I asked the Interpol agent.
“Of course I am,” he answered calmly.
“What did you want to talk to me about?”
Vashlov shrugged and began. “It was, I think, about a year ago when my section of Interpol began investigating a certain group. The group consists of powerful elders in various admedistrations and the heads of certain medical industrial collectives, as well as a few scholars and scientists. They were researching ways to improperly access people’s WatchMe and medcare units in order to activate a certain technology during crises.”
“What kind of technology?”
“We’re not entirely sure yet. All we know is that they are able to use the admedistration WatchMe servers to access people’s bodies directly. That, and their ideology reflects strong memories of the Maelstrom.”
The Maelstrom—the years of chaos and mushroom clouds that had opened mankind’s eyes to its true nature and inspired our current lifeist society.
“They—these old people—are afraid that humanity will once again fall into the chaos of those years. There are plenty of theories as to why the Maelstrom happened, but one thing it did prove was that our brains are capable of reverting to barbarism with shocking alacrity. And it only took tens of millions of people to die to prove it. Which is why they moved to put all of humanity under observation—through WatchMe. They call themselves the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group.”
I had to collect my thoughts for a moment to process this story of megalomaniacal conspiracy. The man had Interpol ID, and he didn’t seem delusional—it was just that the scale of his conspiracy theory was so grand. He was asking me to believe that all human life was basically under the watchful eye of a select group of people.
“There’s no need to give me that look. I’ll show you my Interpol psych evaluation, if you like.”
“I’m just not sure how to take this.” Of all the things I had anticipated this man telling me, a conspiracy theory was not one of them.
“I completely understand, but you’re going to have to believe me. We do not have much time left.”
“You mean there’s going to be another wave of suicides?”
“Or something like that, yes. On the day of the incident, this group performed a test of their system. Just a test, to see if the technology worked as intended. The test was a success—save for an unexpected mass wave of simultaneous suicides.”
“You mean to tell me that was an accident?”
I found it hard to believe that an organization founded on fear of the Maelstrom, no matter how megalomaniacal, would make a technology capable of ending so many lives and causing so much fear. Wasn’t that exactly what they would be trying to prevent?
“No, not an accident. According to our source, there is another group within this group. Though they share the same objectives, they are directly opposed to the larger group on the issue of the means to that end. A rogue faction, if you will.”
“So this ideological rift within the group was the trigger that caused all those deaths?”
“Rather, what we saw was one act in the confrontation between these two groups. The suicides were a power play by the rogue faction, if you will.”
A little office spat among a group of megalomaniacs, resulting in a mountain of corpses.
“Then why bring this to me?” I asked.
“In order to ask for your help, of course. Rather, we want to help you with your investigation. I’ll be frank. There are elements within Interpol that have not taken kindly to the Helix Inspection Agency inserting themselves into the investigation of the incident. There was quite a heated debate about it. The naysayers felt that this was strictly a criminal case, and that WHO, an admedistration monitoring agency, was using the incident as an excuse to make a grab for more authority.”
“They were probably right.”
Stauffenberg was first and foremost among the expansionists. I had once listened to her give a speech in which she claimed that the Helix Inspection Agency, as defenders of lifeism, had an obligation to deal with any and every threat to human lives or health.
“Even still, with what’s happened, and worse to come, cooperation seems to be the only choice. We do not know when they will make the next move. All we know is that we have to stop them before—excuse me.”
Vashlov put a hand to one ear. Someone calling him on his HeadPhone.
Unconsciously, I reached up and rubbed the back of my own scalp.
Right inside here.
Inside the gray matter in my skull.
Some old farts, in their fear of the Maelstrom, had built a little medicule network there for me. Our free will was the last thread of ourselves not yet outsourced. Yet there was a mechanism that could take even that away from me, a mechanism controlled by a group of people that didn’t believe in our society, not that they wanted us to believe in it. If that network suddenly ordered me to kill myself, then I would draw the gun I wore at my side and, without a single conflicting thought, shoot myself in the head. I found myself really wanting to know exactly how it would work when the time came.
This was the result of outsourcing all our bodily functions. By entrusting our bodies to others through WatchMe, we had reached the point where we could no longer support our own selves without those external mechanisms to help us.
Humans are good at dividing up labor.
Food must’ve been a very personal thing for most people in the beginning. Now, the whole process had been divided into so many stages, each with their own specialists. I doubted anyone today really understood the routes food took from its origins to their mouths.
Vashlov tapped me on the shoulder. “Got a news report coming in on Network 24. Check it out.”
I called up a media channel in one corner of my field of vision. I linked to Network 24 and immediately saw the emergency news report tag. A newscaster with a nervous look on his face began reading from the prompter on his AR.
“Good day, this is Edison Carter. What we are about to broadcast is the contents of a memorycel we received at our news bureau just moments ago. The memorycel contains a message from a person claiming responsibility for the recent mass suicide incident.”
“What’s this all about?” I asked Vashlov.
He shook his head in disbelief. “I wish I knew. We’ll just have to watch.”
The self-review committee at Network 24 had a reputation for being a little looser than other media outlets. A short while earlier, the image of a dead soldier appearing in a corner of one frame during a report on the violence in Chechnya had sparked an outcry against the station. Most other media outlets subjected everything they showed to an AI editor before broadcast in order to prevent any possibility of showing something emotionally traumatic. Relatively speaking, then, Network 24 was pretty extreme and as such not entirely worthless as a news source.
“We will begin play back now,” Edison Carter said. The screen went black.
I’m not sure when they’ll play this, so let me wish you a good morning, a good day, and a good evening.
It was a female voice, heavily modulated.
There was no picture. Only the words voice only in the middle of the screen.
I closed my eyes. Maybe that way I could hear a kernel of the real person—which could very well have been Miach Mihie.Besides, if there were no picture, what was the point of looking at it?
A lot of people have died.
A lot of people ended their own lives all at the same time.
I’m sure it was shocking.
I’m sure you’re frightened at the possibility of seeing someone die before your eyes.
We did this.
Our methods are, at present, a secret.
However, the framework for the method is already inside you, inside each of your brains.
It’s too late to take it out now.
You are all our hostages.
I tried to listen through the warbling blips of whatever masking process had been applied to the voice for a trace of Miach Mihie and was unsuccessful.
You already know what we are capable of.
You’re frightened. You’re angry. You are experiencing many emotions.
These emotions are real. Treasure them.
Our society has been engineered to suppress your emotions.
You are being crushed beneath words of kindness.
This is not written anywhere. It is not the law.
Yet it binds you all the same. Never has there been a generation so self-regulated. Never has there been a civilization so weighted down by rules not generated from within, but without.
No one can say what’s really on their mind. Since we were children, we have been told that we are vital resources to our society. Our bodies do not belong to us, they belong to society at large. They are public property.