by Project Itoh
I am sure you have all heard about the rise in the suicide rate. You’re not the only one who wants to escape.
The message was a familiar one.
Miach’s words to me and Cian echoed in my head.
Words that had given a clear shape to our suffering.
We are going to create a new world.
In order to do that, we need to know who is capable of making change.
Within the next week, I want you each to kill at least one other person.
I don’t care what means you have to use.
I want you to prove that you’re capable of doing anything to serve your own ends. Prove that other people don’t matter.
Accept the fact that your life is the most important.Revel in it.
Those who are unable or unwilling to perform this small task will die.
You know we can follow through with this threat. You have seen what we can do.
If you should hesitate to take someone else’s life, even if it means saving yourself, then we will kill you without mercy.
That is, you will kill yourself.
We can do this with the press of a button.
For those who do not yet believe us, we will show you proof.
You will be able to see it for only a moment.
Watch closely.
“That is all the voice data we have received at Network 24.”The screen switched back to Edison Carter. He was reading from an AR script again. “We traced the origin of the message, however. The person or people who sent it used the ID of one of the recent mass suicide victims.” At that point, the star reporter of Network 24 casually reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a pen, and slammed it into his right eye.
Vashlov covered his eyes.
The AI censor kicked in.
Before Carter began scrambling his own brains on a global feed, the image cut out, replaced by scrolling text apologizing for the emotionally traumatic visuals, and urging all viewers to seek appropriate therapy as soon as possible. They even displayed the ID of the nearest therapeutic center. Like therapy would negate the fact that Carter had just committed suicide in front of the world.
“Shit, I can’t believe I just saw that. Shit!”
Vashlov was muttering under his breath.
On the battlefield, I had seen bodies with their heads blown off, abandoned corpses in advanced states of decay. As such, the image wasn’t a particularly shocking one, but the circumstances were more than enough to give me pause.
If this really was Miach’s doing, the girl needed serious therapy.She needed enough pharmaceuticals and counseling to rewire her brain.
I raced the car on to the airport. There was no time to waste.I had to get to Baghdad before the monster lurking beneath the heavy clouds of kindness awoke and bared its fangs.
02
I don’t belong in this world.
The first time I had that thought was during an admedistration morality session. I was still in middle school, so I went as an observer with my parents. I say “went,” but the session was in AR. The topics on the table began with some very nuanced, hard to define, and frankly meaningless points about the propriety of certain advertisements.Gradually though—I don’t recall the particulars of how it happened now—the discussion shifted to moral concerns about the use of caffeine.
I had always thought that tea was tea.
Coffee was coffee.
Except that, just like all wine contained alcohol, these beverages contained caffeine.
To this day I remember her clearly, the woman with a big voice who was running the show. I don’t remember her name. She began very demurely, waiting for her turn to take the floor. Yet when she spoke, her words were anything but demure.
“I was just wondering if there isn’t a moral problem with the taking of caffeine.”
According to her, caffeine was basically
“Caffeine is essentially addictive,” the woman said.
Very softly.
A gentle denunciation.
“It just seems to me,” she went on to say, “that there is something indecent about the effects of long-term use.”
“What about those who require the use of caffeine in their occupation?” asked my father, the scientist. This was why I was soon to witness my father being verbally pummeled in public. Which was odd, because as far as I could tell, what he had said was correct, common sense, and altogether noninflammatory.
But the woman’s argument was so in line with admedistration ideas of propriety, so modestly put—and so one-sided, so easy to understand, and so filled with determination.
Determination after determination.
People in the admedistrations liked other people to decide things for them. People who made decisions created an atmosphere. Scientists had always been bad at this. That was because the facts could be dry and were often complex; yet by necessity the truth must be plain enough to withstand repeated inquiry, all of which made it unappealing. So my father told me some time after the session had ended.
My father had said that certain occupations required the use of caffeine, and that there were certain kinds of stress that caffeine helped reduce.
“The arguments Mr. Kirie gives us,” the woman said, close to the end of the session, “are quite like the rationales given by those who clung to their tobacco and alcohol habits, even when everyone around them had abandoned the foul things.”
Not once did my father manage to get the word moderation in edgewise. Though caffeine wasn’t about to be wholly abolished, the atmosphere in the session clearly colored caffeine as a poisonous, indecent substance to be avoided.
I felt sick through most of the session.
Not an upset stomach. More of a spiritual queasiness. Like my mind wanted to vomit. To me, the woman was a menace, and I couldn’t understand why everyone in the session seemed to be nodding and swallowing the venomous words she spat out like candy.
“I know it’s not very realistic, but I have a dream that someday,” the woman said in closing, “someday caffeine will be entirely abolished.”
I regretted having asked my parents to take me with them to the session.
I remembered seeing a media channel where they showed picture after picture of food items I had never seen before in my life. When I asked my father what it was, he said they called it the “Two Minutes’ Hate.”
“It’s for us, mainly, the last generation who ate food with too much fat, too much cholesterol, too much salt—food that’s bad for your health and not properly resource-aware. We were to watch that and think ‘I can’t eat that. People who eat those things aren’t fit to be in our society. They lack resource awareness. They’re harming their public body.’ It’s a form of self-suggestion.”
The program had aired regularly ten years before. And now the kind of hatred against unhealthy food that started with the Two Minutes’ Hate had born fruit in the form of opinions like the one we heard in the session that day—a call for everyone to join in a shared hatred of caffeine.
I was proud of my father. He had created Wat
chMe. He had changed the world. I didn’t want to see him shamed like this. If this was the admedistration, if this was the world, then I didn’t want to be there. This was long before I met Miach, but my feeling of discomfort that day was so severe that I remembered the morality session for a long time afterward. The discomfort followed me to school, and even when I played games at home. It was always there, gnawing at my stomach. I never wanted to go to a session again.
The first person to notice my discomfort was a girl reading a book by the jungle gym in the park I passed by on my way home from school. She walked up to me and asked if I knew why the jungle gym bars warped the way they did.
≡
“This is BirdRider with an announcement for all passengers. This Northern Passengers 947 DR flight out of Tokyo will be landing in the Baghdad Medopolis in one hour.”
The announcement telling me my arrival time came like a soft whisper in my ear. Very pleasant. Unpleasant things were abhorred in this world.
No disease, no unsettling tastes, no disturbing images. If, by some gross miscalculation, you did happen across any of these things, there were plenty of therapists waiting to help.
A world devoid of unpleasantness. I wondered how much further we had to go until we reached a world devoid of life. The land of the dead.
While the silky soft voice sounded next to my ear, I leaned forward in my seat and looked out the window at the six main wings of the PassengerBird. The wings rippled and changed form, as if they were actually flapping as they curled around invisible currents of air. Back when airplanes had been the main form of aerial transportation, travel hadn’t been half as elegant.
That put me in mind of the jungle gym again. The words from Miach’s lips.
Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, jungle gyms were still made of metal. Not intelligent, not morphable. Not even soft.
I thought by now I was my own woman, but here I was, chasing after Miach’s shadow again. For most of my time in flight, I had been reading a paper about healthy society that Professor Saeki had recommended to me. It turned out that there were many things the Nazis had started. PA systems, for instance. Before digital delivery and direct feeds to HeadPhones became widespread, these electronic devices magnified one’s voice in order to broadcast information to many people at the same time. The autobahn had been the grandfather of our modern expressway. Funny that it was only scholars who seemed to associate the Nazis with a healthy society.
“Hitler’s mother died of breast cancer, you know,” Professor Saeki said. “Her doctor was a Jew. That’s what started Hitler’s hatred of the Jewish people. In other words, the Holocaust was born from Hitler’s mother’s breast…I forget whether it was the right or the left.”
I left my seat and walked up the steps from the passenger area to the café on the PassengerBird’s upper deck lounge. Up here, it was like you were standing on the roof of the Bird. Blue sky stretched in every direction, and the sea of clouds below shone a brilliant white, thick with moisture. Perhaps with this in mind, the floor had been made of a supple white material that gave softly under pressure, visually blending with the clouds at its edges. The walls of the PassengerBird were made of an intelligent material that went transparent when you looked at it, giving its passengers a panoramic view. If it were not for the thin lines of the PassengerBird’s frame, it would have seemed like you were floating in the sky.
Everything in the world is floating in the sky.
When there’s no disease, when time has stopped.
People who take nicotine know nothing of politeness.
Nicotine makes your arteries shrink and your blood run thick.
Schopenhauer and Kant both despised smoking, Professor Saeki told me.
I rested my elbows on the bar counter and ordered a small enough portion of caffeine to not break any rules of etiquette. Though tobacco and alcohol had been thoroughly obliterated, I was glad that caffeine had somehow managed to hang on. Even so, there were a lot of people who frowned at you if you ordered a cup of coffee, signs of a slowly building wave of momentum against caffeine. It had gotten worse in the last decade.
I went to one corner of the café and found a seat—one of several red gelatinous mushrooms protruding from the white deck. The café was completely empty. There were hardly any passengers either. I asked one of the attendants whether this was typical of the flight, and he agreed that numbers were down today.
Because the world had changed.
People were staying in their homes, thinking. No longer could anyone say for sure they wouldn’t be dying anytime soon. Especially not the people who had witnessed the newscaster killing himself.
To each, his or her own level of internal conflict.
Distress, hesitation, resentment, raw emotion.
Should I not kill and die, or should I kill and live? That was the question.
I imagined darkness sweeping through the households of the world in a churning wave of bleak emotions. Most admedistrations had called immediate sessions to discuss the declaration, but hardly anyone had shown up. What was there to discuss?
Okay, everyone, I’d like to start today’s session.
Should we really kill others so that we can survive?
Should we use knives or blunt instruments?
No one here has a gun, do they?
I had a hard time imagining it. Yet if they didn’t deal with the matter head on, what was left but empty platitudes? Calm down, everyone is going to be okay—even when they knew they wouldn’t be. This wasn’t something you could discuss in public. This was a decision everyone had to make on their own. At this moment, everyone in the world was being tested.
Just thinking about it made me grit my teeth and start fiddling with my fingers. It was times like this you really needed some nicotine.
It had been several days now since I’d had a smoke, and I missed it. I couldn’t eat to compensate either, or I’d get fat, which would draw unwanted attention. Being fat was even worse than having bad skin. Deviations from standard physique really stood out when everyone was listening so attentively to their health consultant’s advice and following their perfectly designed lifestyle plans to the letter. The range of acceptable body types grew narrower every year.
Q: How long will this game go on?
A: We want to keep everyone playing until the body fat ratio of everyone in the world is plus or minus 1 percent of everyone else of their own gender. There are several ways to quit the game along the way, such as death, death, or our favorite, death.
Maybe the ones who had killed themselves just wanted out.
Heidrich and Himmler tried to eliminate obesity among the SS, Professor Saeki said. Himmler’s dream was that one day, all Germans would be vegetarians.
Maybe everyone wanted out of the game, but the atmosphere of conformity that society generated was too hard to break free of, and eventually, they gave up trying to quit. I had stayed in, myself, but in ways that didn’t require me to be serious about it at all. This meant that I had to spend most of my time on the fringes, tromping across battlefields.
Capital city of Iraq. Located in the middle of Iraq on the Mesopotamian plain. Baghdad is an old city, built during the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate and nearly destroyed in a wave of terro
rist attacks against a U.S. occupying force stationed there following the second Gulf War at the beginning of this century. After the Maelstrom, Baghdad reinvented itself as a medical industry mecca. Tax breaks favoring medical investors and laws allowing the testing of experimental treatments on humans made the city an attractive place for medical industrial combines, medical think tanks, and research organizations, all who raced to establish their headquarters here, giving rise to the city’s nickname, “Medical Dubai.”
I looked through the passenger compartment and saw that, indeed, most people were somehow tied to the medical industry.
Of course, when I thought about it, it was difficult to find someone in our modern society who didn’t have a connection to some sort of medical service. I was reminded that my Helix agent ID made me stand out like a sore thumb. Especially with me standing up here, doing caffeine.
I scrunched down into my gelatin seat and watched as the PassengerBird wheeled through the sky. The seat twisted beneath me, absorbing the extra Gs as we descended to the Baghdad landing deck.
≡
It didn’t take long for the first cracks to appear in the world’s facade.
While I was in the PassengerBird an Italian man hanged himself: Luigi Vercotti, a volunteer resource manager in the Weiland Admedistration.
Vercotti had a six-year-old son and a thirty-eight-year-old wife. He had made a loop in a necktie while his wife and child were out shopping, tied it to a rafter, and kicked the small crate he’d been standing on out from under his feet.
The weight of his entire body falls on his neck.
The carotid artery begins to scream under the pressure.
The brain ceases to function in less than ten seconds’ time.