Harmony

by Project Itoh

  Miach’s lunch was nothing like ours. The recipes were incredibly simple, and more than two-thirds of her rather large lunch box would be filled with white rice and a big reddish-black lump in the middle of it that I think was probably an umeboshi pickled plum.

  “Naoya Shiga used to say that the Japanese lost the war because they ate white rice,” Miach said, her cheeks full of white rice laced with sesame salt. A single grain of rice was stuck to her cheek.

  “What war?”

  “The Second World War. It was a fight between the two nations of America and Japan.”

  “But didn’t both of them get divided up by the admedistrations?”

  “Right, but this was back when America was still a country. Before the Maelstrom.”

  “Um, Miach, that’s great, but you have rice on your face,” Cian broke in, giggling.

  “Oh.” Miach found it with her index finger and plucked it off.

  “Why do you eat so much all the time, Miach?”

  “Because I like to eat. And if I don’t eat this much, my head doesn’t work right.”

  I looked between my lunch and Miach’s. “You don’t have many things besides rice in there. It’s mostly all rice. And your lunch box is huge too.”

  “Yet I’m skinny. Funny, isn’t it? The brown adipose tissue on my back did a number on my metabolism. I burn everything and none of the food gets to my brain. That’s why I have to shove so much of it in. If there was a speed-eating contest, I bet I’d win it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “These contests where people would try to see who could eat the most the fastest. The media channels used to show things like that, before the Maelstrom. It’s all shockingly unhealthy. The kind of thing those people in morality sessions love to bad-mouth.”

  It sounded pretty horrible. I didn’t see how there could be any pleasure in damaging your stomach and intestines by eating so much. I sat down on the rooftop, looking down on city streets devoid of any shapes or colors that might prove too stimulating. “So, what do you tell your mom or dad what you want to eat for lunch?”

  “I don’t. That is, I make my lunch myself. Of course my mom wants me to use this nosy lifestyle pattern designer or something. No thanks.”

  “Doesn’t it reflect poorly on your mom’s SA score if her daughter doesn’t take her health advice?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe not. I’m never really sure about those things. You know the old saying, ‘Kids grow up despite their parents.’”

  “Yeah, but isn’t it a little different? I thought it went: ‘Even without parents, children will flourish.’”

  “Yes, that’s the original. But there was this writer named Ango Sakaguchi, and he said that children would flourish without the useless baggage that is their parents. That’s a lot different than saying a kid’s going to grow up even without the benefit of parents. Of course, a lot of people have different ideas as to what constitutes flourishing.”

  “Sakaguchi, huh? Sounds interesting.”

  “You can download it from the Borgesnet. I recommend actually reading it—you know, with your eyes—instead of using the reader.”

  So saying, Miach picked up a large lump of rice sprinkled with sesame salt and crammed it into her mouth. The sight of her chewing with both cheeks full was so comical I had to laugh.

  “What?”

  “Do you really have to cram it all in at once like that?”

  “I’m just trying to match you guys. You have so much less that if I don’t eat quick, I’ll never keep up.”

  “Don’t worry about keeping up with me,” Cian said. “I always leave some anyway.” She closed her lunch box with an audible snap. “My parents want me to eat it, but it’s way too much for the middle of the day.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I don’t really get hungry until two or three o’clock. At noon I still feel full from breakfast.”

  “Do you know why we eat lunch at noon?” Miach asked through a full mouth.

  I shrugged. “Is it because we’re hungry?”

  “Apparently Cian isn’t.”

  I looked in Cian’s direction, then lowered my head. “Oh, right. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay, you don’t have to apologize.”

  “Neither of you do,” Miach joined in. “People get hungry whenever they feel like it, that’s natural. It’s that the school system doesn’t approve of natural human flexibility.”

  “Well, if you’re going to have a group of people eating, it makes sense to eat together.”

  “Why can’t we eat during class is what I want to know.”

  Now that she mentioned it, it did seem curious that people often read or watched media channels while they were eating, but we weren’t supposed to eat while we read our textbooks in school. Maybe it was because it would distract us from class? But that didn’t make sense either. Class and lunch were equally boring. At least, my mother’s lunches never tasted good enough to distract me from anything.

  “It’s a rule. These rules are meant to divide up our time, partition it, control it. Strictly speaking, by getting hungry around two or three o’clock, Cian’s digestive system is going against the rules—and Cian blames her own body for not being able to get with the program. She blames herself. How silly is that?”

  Miach was in the zone now. Miach, our ideologue. She gathered up another ball of rice with her chopsticks, still talking. “The time divisions at school have been the same for a long while. What started as the idea that it was fun for everyone to eat together, or that it made more sense for work, eventually became proscribed in more detail, with start times and end times. It became a rule. You know there was no such thing as lifestyle pattern designers before lifeism took off? But once something like that becomes popular, it becomes the thing to do, then it becomes a rule, then it becomes law. Just another of the invisible things out there trying to control our bodies.”

  Miach kept talking at full speed, her cheeks full of a lot of rice and a little bit of toppings. Finally she tossed back the last bit of rice, packed up her lunch box, and put it back in her bag. Then she stood and walked over to the railing that ran around the rooftop and spoke out loud, like she was making a proclamation to the scenery—or even to the entire world.

  “‘It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most “private.”’”

  “Who said that?”

  “Michel Foucault.”

  Even though her lunch was much bigger than ours, Miach had finished way before we were done. I ate up the last of mine, wrapped my lunch box in a cloth, and tucked it away inside my bag. A quiet breeze blew, brushing past our foreheads and through our hair.

  Death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it.

  “So is that the only way out?” I asked quietly.

  Miach was looking out over the city, confronting it. “I used to be in another place, under the dominion of another power. It was hell,” she said without turning around. “That’s why I escaped, to come here. But here’s crazy too. This is no place for people to live.”

  “What was it like, the other place?”

  “The exact opposite of here. Over there guns kill people.

  Here, kindness kills them. It’s all the same.”

 

  So here I was, thirteen years later, in that other place Miach had told us about.

  Already, several small-scale disturbances had broken out across the globe. The police forces, accustomed to the peaceful routine of everyday life, were immediately overloaded, and many cities and admedistrations had gone weeping to those few remaining countries with standing militaries to beg for assistance.

 

 

  Franz Recht picked up the knife his wife always used and looked at it.

  It was the knife she used to cut cabbage for her
sauerkraut.

  The knife she used to slice blutwurst.

  Franz Recht had never been very good at cooking. He had left all that to her. He would clean up around the house and go shopping, but he had never cooked a single meal. It had been a long time since he had even set foot in the kitchen.

  Once he had stepped in though, his eyes had started to swim. Perhaps he was dazed by the sheer variety of potentially lethal items he found there. Practically any of them would suit his current purpose. Which made sense, when he thought about it. This was a place for ending and processing life.

  Cutting, carving, beating, burning, stewing, steaming.

  Many religions have rules about food.

 

  Kosher

 

  Dietary restrictions followed by those of the Jewish faith. As blood is life, goes one teaching, the blood must be removed from food in the proper manner. A strict observer’s kitchen will have two sinks. One to drain the blood and purify the food, the other for typical kitchen use. Pork, considered to never be clean, is prohibited.

 

  Halal

 

  Tenets of Islam, especially those pertaining to food. Halal literally means “that which is permitted by Allah.” All meat must be slaughtered according to the method called dhabiha if it is to be halal. Dhabiha requires that you use a sharp knife to cut the windpipe, esophagus, and carotid artery swiftly, so as to cause the animal as little pain as possible, while leaving the spinal cord intact. The preparer then says “Bismillah Allahu akbar” to ask for Allah’s blessing, and only then is the meat considered to be halal.

 

 

  This was the way food used to be. Only consumed after all the necessary, annoying protocol had been followed. That was how killing was too.

  “Honey!”

  A call from the door. Franz’s wife was home. His eyes went to the entranceway. Franz went down the hall to greet his wife just inside the door, where he plunged the carving knife he had just picked up in the kitchen into her chest.

  Being a rather moderate Christian, Franz had no need for halal or dhabiha. He certainly wasn’t going to say Allahu akbar. He just had to thrust out with his arm to bury the knife—the one she used to cut the cabbage for her sauerkraut—into her rib cage.

  Her eyes met his in surprise.

  Perhaps he was frightened, or perhaps—being an amateur at this—he wasn’t sure how much force was necessary to actually kill, or whether he had managed to hit a vital organ. So to be safe, Franz knelt over his fallen wife and stabbed her again and again. He stabbed her in the chest and the stomach and everywhere except her head, that head with the beautiful face. He kept stabbing for several minutes until her body was in ribbons.

 

  Then Franz put a hand to one ear and called the police, while he was still straddling his wife’s corpse. Yes, I just killed my wife. Yes. You know, what they were saying, how we had to kill someone or we would die? I figured there’s no death penalty in this country. And I don’t mean to be demanding, but could you please send a patrol car to pick me up? What?They’re all out? I see, well I suppose everyone is busy these days. Busy like me.

  Franz hung up the phone and stared at the body beneath him for a few moments before he began to weep.

 

  “And that’s just one example,” Stauffenberg was saying. Everyone participating in the AR session was standing, stunned, wherever they happened to be in the real world.

  “It appears the declaration started to take hold in earnest yesterday. We’ve had other killings and many suicides as well. Even with the gag order on the media, everyone seems to be getting the same idea.”

  Someone asked what the admedistrations were doing.

  Stauffenberg shook her head. “Those admedistrations with enough wherewithal to hire civilian police forces have sent them all out already. In addition, at the general assembly of the admedistrations, they made a request for national police forces and armies and, if possible, Geneva Convention forces to be placed in every city, but it’s already getting difficult to find available troops, and many places are already too destabilized to help. Riots and lawlessness are spreading. It is, in fact, looking like the second coming of the Maelstrom, at least to hear the older folks tell it. No place is safe. Kill another, kill yourself, or be killed. It’s the perfect recipe for chaos.”

  Different images flickered on the virtual screen. A pile of bloody corpses, thirty high, resting on a cobblestone street in some typical European village. Medical troops wearing pink gas masks were adding bodies to the pile, trying to clear a path for vehicles to pass. Another clip showed men and women breaking through barricades, wielding sticks and pipes against the army; the troops turned to using nonlethal microwaves to keep them back. The rioters would just run off in some other direction. No matter what the soldiers did, it was ineffective.

  “The day after tomorrow is the deadline, so to speak. Fear has swallowed many already, and it will get worse.”

  A satellite image showed a group of half-dressed men in a circle around two combatants wielding knives, caught by the satellite’s cold gaze. The men around were urging on the two in the middle. Once each of them had killed one other person, the group would disperse. If men had the rational capacity to make rules for killing like this, how could they lack the rational ability to choose not to believe the declaration and let the deadline come? Our hyperbolic valuing system overestimated the clear and present fear, driving us to illogical action.

  We were breaking open the piggy bank with money still in our wallets.

  “There are, at present, no reports of any murders within our police or military forces. However, I would not be much surprised if those reports came—merely disheartened.”

  “Even if the killer was a Helix agent?” I asked with dark sarcasm in my voice.

  Prime’s lips thinned, and a twisted smile came to her face. “Yes, even then. I fully intend to stay at my post until the moment of reckoning, as I believe all of you will choose to do, but with such chaos before us, I can understand if you are finding your resolve tested. Not that I’m worried about you, Agent Kirie. You’ve already killed someone, haven’t you.”

  “In self-defense.”

  “Lucky for you. Must be nice to kill without feeling guilt.”

  “Shouldn’t we be talking about the investigation?” I asked, countering Stauffenberg’s sarcasm with duty. Prime nodded quietly and motioned for me to continue.

  “This gets a little complicated, but bear with me. The man I killed was a member of Interpol, yet he was using his authority as such for the benefit of a secret society to which he belonged. His name was Elijah Vashlov. I have confirmed that he was on staff at Interpol HQ as an intelligence regulator. Intel regulators are responsible for sifting through the fractured intelligence relating to crimes that cross between the jurisdiction of multiple governments and/or admedistrations, and help negotiate information-sharing protocols.”

  “Which is why he showed up both in Japan and in Baghdad.”

  “That’s right. The secret society for which he worked is called the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group. This group was launched soon after the Maelstrom ended and consists of top people in the admedistrations, medical industrial collectives, the upper echelon of WHO, and a handful of independent scientists. I was unable to obtain more information than this from Vashlov. According to the information I did obtain, this group’s primary objective is to prevent global chaos like the Maelstrom from ever happening again. Toward this end, they had enlisted the help of neuromedical researchers.”

  “Can you explain this research?”

  “They’re looking into the connection between human will and human action. I’m no expert on the subject, so that’s about as far as I got.”

  “And then you killed the man who gave you this information?”

  “My
father was also killed. By Vashlov,” I replied, straining to keep my anger in check.

  “That’s right. I hear he took a bullet for you. Can you explain why you went to meet with your father?”

  “Because I had heard he was part of the Next-Gen group. My father is a famous scientist, the one who first postulated the basic theory that made WatchMe and medcare a possibility. It seemed not at all unlikely that such a group would call for his services.”

  “Yet that doesn’t make sense. If everything you have told us is true, that would mean that this Vashlov fellow killed your father even though they were part of the same group.”

  I thought for a moment. Two people were dead. One of them by my hand. There was only so far I could take this without revealing something. I needed to figure out how few of my cards I could show and how far I could get away with some harmless lies in order for Stauffenberg to be satisfied.

  “Within this group, there are two factions, each with different ideologies. Vashlov identified himself as a heretic within the group. I can only speculate that he was referring to this internal conflict.”

  “And now that your father and this Vashlov are both dead, there is nothing remaining to prove the existence of this conspiracy.”

  No, that wasn’t true. Vashlov had told me that the SEC Neuromedical Research Consortium was merely a public front for the Next-Gen group.

  “There is one other known collaborator by the name of Gabrielle Étaín.”

  “Who is dead. Murdered. Three hours ago.”

  “What?” I gasped.

  Stauffenberg was staring me down. “It was a random killing, as random as any of the killings in the world have been these last few days. It happened in broad daylight, in a corridor of the Dian Cécht complex in Baghdad. With all the scientists, who tend to be more levelheaded than the average mob, there have been fewer killings and group suicides in Baghdad—but there have been some exceptions. Within Dian Cécht alone, there have already been fourteen untimely deaths, both murders and suicides in just the last two days. Already, the casework is far beyond what security and the Baghdad police can handle.”