by Project Itoh
“I had no idea.”
“Few people do. Myself, I prefer to enjoy life, so I spend a lot of time finding loopholes in the system.”
The proprietor brought out chicken pilaf next. I looked up from my plate to see a boy tapping Uwe on the shoulder. When did he get in here, I wondered. He certainly hadn’t come in through the front door. He was wearing a necklace of spent rifle cartridges over a woven ethnic shawl of some sort. Maybe a warrior, and a young one at that. Uwe turned around and said something to him, upon which the boy faced me and stuck out his hand.
“He says give him whatever it is you have for his boss,” Uwe explained.
I pulled a scrap of paper out of my pocket.
“What, just a piece of paper?” Uwe asked, and I assured him that was all. I told the boy to make sure his boss got it, and Uwe translated for me. The boy nodded, a serious look on his face, and slipped out through the back door of the bar.
“You sure that was all you wanted to give him?”
“I am. Better dig in. Your pilaf’s getting cold.”
“Not a bad idea—and since we’re both here on business, we don’t have to worry about oil or cholesterol or any moral concerns. Let’s eat!”
≡
We stuffed ourselves and went back to Uwe’s office, where he found a single folded piece of paper sitting on his desk. He frowned. “You got a response. That was quick.”
I stepped in front of him and picked up the piece of paper. It began with a line of numbers: coordinates. And then a single word. ALONE.
“That’s waaay out in the mountains,” Uwe said.
I called up WorldVision in my AR and inputted the numbers. A visualization of the world appeared spinning in front of me until I was looking at Eurasia, then the line of the Caucasus in between the Black and Caspian seas. When the texture of the mountainsides became clear, I found I was looking at a rock-strewn hillside with a few straight lines defining the edges of something rectangular in the middle of it.
“That’s a bunker. Pretty old by the looks of it. Must’ve been some Russians holed up to get away from the bombs last century or at the beginning of this one.”
“I’m going. Think you can get me part of the way there?”
“By yourself? No way.”
“I noticed your six-legger out front is armored.”
“Yeah, it’s got a cannon. I forget how many millimeters. That’s an armed transport-use coolie goat.”
“Then I’ll need two days worth of food in bags on that thing. If you can get a truck to carry me and the goat as far as the road goes, that’ll be fine.”
“What about contracted security?”
“Won’t need it.”
“Then you’ll be taking a one-way trip. I can’t stand by and watch you do that.”
Uwe was a surprisingly considerate man. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You wanted me to admit it, so here goes. This is a very personal mission for me. An extremely private mission.”
“We’re talking about your life here. I don’t care how private your reasons are.”
“No, we’re talking about the life of every admedistration civilian in the world. Compared to that, I’m nothing at all. Remember what Stauffenberg said, the fate of the world is on my shoulders. This is something I need to pull off on my own.”
Uwe stared at me for a moment, not really buying my story. Then, at last, he shrugged. “You really do think about nothing other than yourself, do you?”
“That’s right. Like you said, I’m very serious about this. And yeah, I don’t give a shit what happens to the world.”
“That’s not very constructive of you, but I can’t say I disapprove. Hey, I’m mostly in this job for the beer and the smokes myself.”
Uwe put a hand to his ear and began talking to someone.
“Yuri? Hello? Uwe here. I need someone to carry a woman and a transport goat up into the mountains. Yeah, right away.”
03
I could feel the wind growing colder against my skin with every gain in elevation.
It was just me and the six-legged goat in the back of the truck. The goat had been put together to army specs, so no pink was involved. Everything was drab olive, smoky, dirty— the colors of war. I had been told that the six-legger’s control mechanism consisted of cultivated horse nerves specially trained for the environment. The original horse came from local stock, so they were used to the mountains, Uwe said. It bore a Geneva Convention Forces stencil on its amply armored side. There were cultivated parts, muscles extracted from an actual mountain goat, and a complex network of machinery, making it impossible to tell whether it was more biological or mechanical.
The goat had no head, and it would have taken considerable imagination to call the sensors bristling from its front end a face. The closest I could get to making sense of it was to think of it as a mountain goat with its head lopped off.
We went rocking and swaying up the mountain road for some time, but not once did the driver look back to talk to me. Not that I would have been able to respond, not knowing Russian. I was beginning to feel a strange affinity for my cybernetic companion when the truck came to a lurching stop.
The back opened, and the driver was standing outside, motioning me to exit. I gave the goat a slap on the rump and it stood smoothly under its heavy load and hopped down onto the gravelly path. I scanned an aerial photograph of our surroundings linked to the GPS in my AR. It would take a half day or more from here to reach the bunker site. There was hardly a path at all, but my high-resolution satellite imagery would make the going relatively painless. I waved to the driver and thanked him. He went back down the road without a word.
I was now thoroughly in the mountains. The rocky face of the Caucasus was black. According to Uwe, the name came from a Greek mutation of an ancient Scythian word meaning “white snow.” Chechnya was to the north of the mountains, and our truck was now near the top of the range, close to the Georgian border to the south. The only snow on the Caucasus was at the peaks. Below 2,500 meters there was only black rock and dirt.
I started to navigate my way up the rocky slope, the goat deftly picking its way along behind me. I felt like a mountain ascetic on his way to meet the gods, though as soon as I had the thought, I banished it from my mind. I didn’t think of—I didn’t want to think of—Miach as a god.
There were no clouds. The humidity was low, but the sun didn’t feel too hot as of yet. Despite the lack of a path, this was where the Chechen guerrillas had made their home, and I didn’t find the going terribly difficult. I could feel the air in my lungs growing thinner as I climbed. A lack of oxygen wasn’t something even WatchMe and a subdermal medcare unit could fix. I had gone off-line some time ago for that matter. My AR was a local simulation, working off the GPS I carried.
“Being this alone is actually kind of exciting,” I said to the goat.
The goat plodded along in silence.
After three hours in the trackless wilderness, I found something resembling a proper path. According to my navigator, I had another six hours of this before I reached my destination. The path was fairly wide—I even saw traces of tire tracks. Probably left by the Russians during earlier conflicts in the region.
Every once in a while I rested to fill my mouth with water and acclimatize to the air. The transport goat had its own recycler unit embedded, so it didn’t require much in the way of drink. I touched his back, as though it were a pet. It wasn’t all that different from a regular animal. The skin was warm beneath a layer of fur. I had seen a civilian militia charge an army riding on these once, though I had forgotten whether it was in Niger or some other part of Africa.
The army in that conflict had been comprised entirely of remote surrogates. The militia had set off an electromagnetic pulse in the area, cutting the connection between the command center and the surrogates and forcing them to enter automated battle mode. Faced with a completely unexpected cybernetic cavalry charge, the surrogate troops had been decimated.
Climb. Rest. Climb. Rest. Even as I grew used to the air, I could feel my stamina failing. This was a natural sensation that came with a reduction in oxygen—a physical symptom that my internal medcare plant couldn’t hide by tweaking my nervous system as it did with pain and other discomfort. Proof that I was alive.
As history marched on, the range of natural experiences considered acceptable in life had shrunk. Where, I wondered, does one draw the line? Why form a wall around the soul or human consciousness? We had already conquered most natural diseases. We had elevated the myth of a normalized human body to a high public standard.
My thoughts drifted while I climbed.
Take diabetes, for example. In its original form, diabetes was a feature humans had developed that helped to deal with cold climates. Water with glucose has a freezing point below zero—beneficial for people faced with the sudden onset of cold temperatures. Even if the sugar destroyed your veins and your kidneys, you’d still live a decade or two, and if you managed to reproduce during that time it was a big win for your DNA. Diabetes was a vital part of our slipshod evolution.
Qualities that were vital in some circumstances became useless or even dangerous when those circumstances changed. We are just collections of DNA optimized for particular places and times. The human genome was a patchwork of solutions for a thousand different problems. It was easy to think of evolution as meaning forward progress, when in reality we, and all living things, were just assorted attempts at survival.
So why put human consciousness up on the altar? Why worship this strange artifact we had attained? Morality, holiness—these were just things our brains picked up along the way, pieces of the patchwork. We only experienced sadness and joy because they benefited our survival in a particular environment. That said, I couldn’t understand how something like joy was really vital. Nor did I know why sadness and despair had helped us survive.
Still, like diabetes, what if the useful shelf life of our emotions had expired some time ago? What if an environment that required us to feel emotions and possess a consciousness was gone? Why hesitate to cure our brains of emotions and consciousness like we had cured our bodies of diabetes?
Mankind had once required anger.
Mankind had once required joy.
Mankind had once required sadness.
Mankind had once required happiness.
Once, once, once.
My epitaph for an environment, and an age, that had disappeared.
Mankind had once required the belief that “I” was “I.”
Keita Saeki, Gabrielle Étaín, and Nuada Kirie.
My encounters with them had removed any basis I had felt for “me” to exist. Like what my father had said about people with the recessive gene for deafness coupling in Martha’s Vineyard, here people with the recessive gene for the absence of consciousness coupled, and that was normal.
Maybe as long as a society based on mutual aid was in place, outmoded features like consciousness were fated to disappear. Maybe we should embrace the social systems we’d developed and throw out the spawning pool of opposition, hesitation, and anguish that was consciousness altogether.
Where are the whys that drive me located?
Where are the words that protect my soul?
Wasn’t my desire to avenge Cian Reikado and my father’s death just the vestiges of a once-vital but now derelict function of my obsolete simian midbrain?
In the past, it was religion that guaranteed “I” was “I.” Everything had been laid out by God, so it wasn’t our place to question things. Now society had entirely lost the functions that religion once performed. Because once we accepted that emotions and all other phenomena occurring in the brain were just traits that happened to be beneficial to our survival at some point in the past, most ideas of morality lost their absolute basis. A morality without absolute conviction—an objective morality—was weak. History contained ample proof of this.
At any rate, today I was going to meet Miach Mihie.
I expected she would have some answers to all this.
After several more breaks, I reached the bunker just as the sun was slipping below the jagged horizon. I could see clouds gathering far off in the distance, and I wondered what elevation I had reached.
One corner of the bunker jutted out from the mountain face, a smooth panel of concrete against the rough edges of rock, with an open doorway in its center.
“Wait here, goaty.”
I used my fingerprint to lock the goat’s weapon systems and checked my own sidearm.
“Okay. I can do this,” I muttered to myself, stepping into the reinforced concrete bunker dug into the mountainside.
“Hello there, Tuan. How long has it been, thirteen years?” came a voice from the darkness inside. The only sounds were the dripping of water and the scuffing of my feet on the ground. I pulled my gun from its holster, the sound of my clothes rubbing together loud in my ears.
“You won’t need your gun. We’re the only ones here, Tuan. Just me and you.”
One step.
Then another.
I switched my AR to light-enhancement mode, revealing the interior of the dimly lit bunker.
“I knew you’d come. I knew you were the only one who’d come.”
I had left the entrance behind me now, where the goat patiently awaited my return.
“I’m right over here, Tuan.”
Miach Mihie appeared as if out of thin air, right in front of the raised barrel of my gun.
She looked almost the same as she had the last time I saw her, when we had been little girls.
“It was a nice idea, bringing my business card. The one I gave you back in high school. I knew it was you right away,” Miach said, raising the card I’d brought from my desk back in Japan. The one I had handed to the messenger boy at the Fawn.
“I knew you would,” I said, keeping the barrel pointed at her. “Vashlov told me you were here.”
“I’m sorry about Vashlov, and about your father.”
Strangely enough, hearing it from Miach didn’t make the blood rush to my head, though I could feel the rage simmering down inside somewhere along with my memories of Cian Reikado.
“I was sure you’d say it couldn’t be helped.”
“Okay, I will. It couldn’t be helped.”
I pulled the trigger. The bullet scraped Miach’s white cheek, leaving a single red line to mark its path.
“Not from where I’m standing. No one had to die.”
“I can see that,” she said. “And I hope no one else has to leave this world.”
“Roughly six thousand people attempted to commit suicide, and of them, nearly three thousand were successful. All lifeist society has been plunged into a murderous mayhem by your one-person, one-kill declaration. And you hope no one else has to die?”
“We had to do all that, otherwise the old geezers wouldn’t push the button.”
“Wouldn’t push the—”
And then it was all clear to me.
I knew what Miach was thinking.
I knew exactly what scenario Miach had painted for the world. I stood with my mouth hanging open, gun still pointed at her.
“That’s right, Tuan,” she said. “We want Harmony.”
It was the day we took those pills.
“I’m taking those things that gave me strength along with me,” Miach said.
I had gotten a call from her and come out to the river just as the sun was beginning to set that night. She was pouring gasoline from a plastic container onto a massive pile of books lying on the riverbank. I have no idea how she’d managed to get them all there. I asked her what she was doing, realizing as I did what an obvious question it was, and yet also feeling that it was my expected role to ask regardless.
“I’m going to burn them. Every one of them.”
If that were true, then the pile of books here represented her entire library, painstakingly compiled over years of allowance. I’d never been to her house at that point, so I had no way of knowing whether these were all of her books. Yet it seemed unlikely that Miach would lie about it.
“I don’t think I could go with these still here.”
“Go where?”
Miach waved her hand at our surroundings, no, at the entire world. “To the other side, away from here. To the place people call heaven or hell. To nothing. I’m afraid these little ones would hold me back, keep me bound here. Besides, if I waited any longer, I’d be too weak to carry them.”
Miach emptied the last drop from the plastic tank she carried. She looked inside and made a face, then pointed the tank mouth toward me.
“Ugh. Gasoline smells terrible. Want a whiff?”
I respectfully declined.
“When a new emperor came into power in China, they would burn all the history books. So they could write new histories,” Miach told me as she screwed the cap back on.
I nodded appreciatively, enjoying the feeling of agreeing with her. Whenever I did that, it felt like Miach was recording a little bit of herself onto me.
“Then, at some point, the whole world became a giant book,” Miach said. People thought they could record everything, so they did.