Harmony

by Project Itoh

  The advent of the CAT scan changed the world.

  X-rays were just photographs, but CAT scans were X-rays taken from multiple angles, combined into images by formulas applied by computers before being output in a visual manner. A photograph was a representation, but a CAT scan was a record.

  “You think WatchMe is like a part of that?” I asked.

  Miach pulled some matches from a pocket and nodded. “It’s the ultimate form of body-recording.”

  Our bodies were being replaced by a record, and it all began with a CAT scan. Whatever happened next would be only a matter of degree. It was constant, and it was already happening. That was what WatchMe was intended to achieve. “That’s why I want to die as a little girl, before I put that thing in my body, before I become something that’s read, like a book.”

  To prove that these tits, this ass, this belly, aren’t a book.

  “Why do you think people write things?”

  I shrugged.

  “Because words remain. Maybe for an eternity. Or at least for something approaching that. The Bible was written for that matter. And the pyramids are kind of a record too.”

  People had always been obsessed with the idea of eternity. No other age had ever convinced more people that their bodies were eternal things. Old age still hung on, a weak, nearly silenced cry of nature, that would doubtlessly soon be conquered. Barbarism had been conquered. “Maybe the Maelstrom was a form of rehabilitation, returning the balance of things to their natural state,” Miach said with a sigh.

  Miach walked over to where I stood behind her, watching.

  “What?” I said, and she pressed the matches into my right hand and closed my fingers around them. Her cool hands felt good against my skin.

  “Could you do this for me? I made it this far, but I don’t think I can do the rest.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Like an athlete lighting a sacred flame, I solemnly tossed a match onto the pile of books. The fire caught in an instant, reducing the pile to ash in a matter of moments. The setting sun painted the riverbank with strange light, while the plasma glow of the fire lit us up from below.

  “They used to burn bodies like this in Japan.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course, that all changed with the Maelstrom.” Miach smiled. Everything had changed. After the great chaos came the great control. And that hardened so fast it could never be shaken.

  “They called it cremation. They would put the things the person loved in their life inside the coffin with them. That custom ended when they started liquefying bodies.”

  “Is this your cremation, Miach?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Because they won’t put these books in my coffin. They gave me strength, so I’m taking them with me.”

  We stood there for a long time, until the sun had set, and Miach’s books had burned out and Miach’s cremation was over. Then we sat on the riverbank and looked out at the town. Miach appointed names for the buildings with one finger, saying, “That’s eternity. That’s the castle of people who believe themselves to be eternal. There’s the king. There’s the government. Those are the old names for the stronghold of rule that the admedistrations have divided into tiny little pieces.

  “I want to kick their eternity in the shins. Catch it with a sucker punch.

  “I want to hit their frozen time where it hurts.”

  “Is that what our deaths will be?” I asked. “Will the world change?”

  “Everything will, for us,” Miach replied.

 

  “We’ve come all this way,” Miach said, and she danced a little jig in one spot. Tap tap tap. She was a little taller, and her tits were more substantial than mine. But she was still a cute little girl.

  “What do you mean, ‘all this way’?”

  “To a brave new world.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “I’m talking about a utopia, Tuan Kirie. A World State. Like in Aldous Huxley’s book.”

  Tap tap.

  “Will we strive for paradise, or will we strive for the truth? After the Maelstrom, mankind chose paradise. We chose a false eternity; we chose to deny that we are nothing more than a collection of adaptation patches applied via the evolutionary process to fit this or that situation. We could have it, if only we could suppress nature. If we could make everything around us artificial, it could be ours. And we’ve already crossed the point of no return.”

  I frowned, still holding up my gun.

  Wasn’t it you who hated that world? Wasn’t it you who denied it? You, Miach Mihie?

  Ta-ta-tap.

  “My father told me that you were—”

  “That’s right, a person without a consciousness. Or you might say, someone who doesn’t require a consciousness. I should say I was a person without a consciousness, now that I’ve gone and gotten myself one. It was born here.”

  Miach spread her arms and twirled like a ballerina, showing me the concrete cave.

  Phweew, phweew, phweew.

  The wind whipping across the heights of the Caucasus made a sad sound like a flute as it passed through the opening to the bunker.

  Phweew, phweew, phweew.

  “This was the base of operations for the Russian army’s prostitution ring. The girls they caught on the battlefield were raped here by the Russian soldiers every day.”

  Phweew, phweew.

  “One of the generals who raped me used to make me touch his antique Tokarev while he penetrated me again and again. This is a gun, he’d say, this is steel, this is power—like it was his second penis. He would stick it in my mouth and make me suck it, over and over and over.”

  I was already crying.

  And wondering what sort of consciousness it took to think about such things and say them so calmly, so brightly.

  Phweew, phweew, phweew.

  I put a hand to my mouth, holding back a wave of nausea.

  “I had the gun in my mouth, was covering it with my own saliva, when my consciousness awoke. This concrete cave is filled with juices—semen, vaginal secretions, blood, tears, snot, and sweat. In that liquid I was born again.”

  Ta-tap, ta-tap, ta-tap.

  “In the end, some vigilantes and an MRS the Chechens had hired saved me. I was picked up by a Japanese adoption agency program seeking to counter the declining population problem, and came to Japan.”

  “You told me,” I managed to say, my eyes and nose running. At some point I had lost the ability to keep my emotions dammed up inside me. “You told me you hated this world. The world of love-and-be-loved that tried to strangle you with kindness. But was it really so bad? Was it worse than Chechnya? Was our society a more terrible place than this bunker?”

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Miach said.

  Ta-ta-tap.

  “When I was twelve years old, the boy living next door to me hanged himself.”

  Ta-ta-tap, ta-ta-tap, ta-ta-tap.

  “He said he hated this world, that he didn’t belong here, and he died. I thought about that. I knew how barbaric people could be. And I knew how broken they could become when they tried to repress that nature. I thought that this society, admedistrative society, this lifeist system was all wrong. A society that wanted me to regulate myself internally, even while people were killing themselves all around me, was just bizarre.”

  It was true that Miach’s passion had given me and Cian a different view of the world and of a society based on the constant monitoring of the human body and health as a value above all others. A society where rigid self-monitoring was the only path to peace and harmony.

  “That’s right, you hated the system of the world. That’s why when you asked us to die, me and Cian said yes.”

  Something about the way I was speaking reminded me of how I talked back in high school. Like when I had been a little girl, eating my lunch with Miach Mihie and Cian Reikado.

  “But I learned something when I left with your father, T
uan.”

  “What?”

  “That people can change. If people can break through the barrier of consciousness.”

  Ta-ta-tap tap. Ta-ta-tap tap.

  “So you didn’t cultivate this chaos because you hate the world,” I said, lowering my gun at last.

  Miach continued her dance for an audience of one. “That’s right. I love it. I love it with all my being—and I want to affirm it. I want to cure the world of its infection, its ‘me’s and ‘I’s.” Miach looked serious. Her dance quickened. “I wrote most of the source code for the neural network your father and his friends installed into the midbrain of every WatchMe user in the world. There were backdoors in the WatchMe control systems of several admedistrations. Backdoors left for us. With such access, it was easy to create a hyperbolic desire for death in many people.”

  All they had to do was reset the value of death as greater than the person’s will for life for the victim to choose oblivion. For those people who quite suddenly found death to be irresistibly attractive, a choice to make, there was no avoiding the erroneous value system’s effect.

  “But the old folks got scared.”

  “The ones running the Next-Gen group.”

  “Yes, and your father was the ideologue at their center.”

  “Ah yes. His proclamation that the creation of a perfect person for our society would make the soul a useless artifact. Funny, isn’t it?”

  “I wasn’t laughing.” Miach stopped her dance and brought her hands together with a loud clap. I heard echoes run through the dark bunker. “I realized that’s what we had to do. There are tens of thousands of girls and boys killing themselves in the world right now. Adults too. We can never remove the barbarism of nature from ourselves completely. We can’t forget that before we are little admedistrative collectives, before we are part of a system or network of relationships, we are animals, plain and simple—a patchwork assortment of functions and logic and emotion all tied together into a bundle.”

  “So you thought that if people were dying because they couldn’t get used to this world—”

  “Yes. That we should give up being human in the first place.”

  Ta-tap, ta-tap, ta-tap.

  Miach resumed her light dance. “By which I mean, we should give up being conscious. We should give up our roughshod armor and become part of the society gnawing at our bones. We should give up being ourselves. Get rid of ‘me’ and consciousness and everything else our environment foisted on us. Only then can our society reach the harmony it was striving for.”

  Ta-ta-ta-ta-tap, ta-tap, ta-tap-ta.

  “They used to tell soldiers they weren’t supposed to wear boots to fit their bodies, they were supposed to fit their bodies into their boots. And we can do that, easily.”

  “If the old folks would agree with you.”

  Once again, Miach’s dance ceased. She let her shoulders fall with a sigh. “That’s right. The old folks think the end of consciousness is a kind of death. Even though there had been a minority living in the Caucasus mountains for thousands of years without anything like a consciousness. As long as a mature system is in place, there is no need for conscious decisions. We have a sufficiently mutually beneficial system, we have software to tell us how to live, we’ve outsourced everything possible, so what need have we of consciousness? The problem isn’t our consciousness, it’s the pain that our having a consciousness brings us when we are forced to regulate ourselves for health or for the community.”

  “We don’t need a will, we don’t need consciousness. And how does this connect with the chaos in the world now?”

  “It’s easy. If the world is teetering on the brink of destruction, the old folks will have no choice but to press the button.”

  Of course. It was so simple.

  “So you’re pushing them to a place where they’ll have to take our consciousnesses away?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’ve engineered this whole situation, then?”

  “That’s right. Technically speaking, it’s not an actual button. It’s a series of codes.”

  Codes. A string of letters telling the world to be a certain way.

  That the world is so.

  “We tried to grab that authority ourselves but were unable to. That’s when the split in the Next-Gen group happened. The main group believes that the reflective consciousness, the part that says ‘I am me,’ must be respected as a vital part of humanity. The minority group, which is us, believe that in our perfected social system, only the human brain remains, and consciousness is only good for unhappiness and should be swept away. They called us heretics, which is why I had to run away, back to the Chechens who had saved me before.”

  Miach and her cohorts had used the authority they had to the fullest.

  They had infiltrated several admedistration servers to which they had access and were able to directly change the value system lodged in the midbrains of constituents. Yet the old guard, despite their memories of the Maelstrom, and ironically the ones who still revered the soul, retained a firm grip on the power of human consciousness. And according to Miach, it had been my dad who held the line with the most determination of all.

  I remembered that day when I was eight or nine when that woman in the session chewed out my dad about caffeine. He had folded before her then, his self-respect melting like ice cream on a summer day, but here, he had believed in the human soul, and consciousness, and the existence of “me” till the end.

  I felt myself growing sad. Sad about how my father had died. This was more than enough reason to want to avenge him.

  “Your father was veeery stubborn,” Miach said, smiling and pointing at me. “He saw the hundreds of thousands of people dying in the worst way possible—suicide—and he pitied them, yet he still claimed we needed our human wills, our consciousnesses. I disagreed. I felt like I had to do something. I wanted to make a world with no souls, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of souls we lose every year.”

  Phweew, phweew, phwee, phweew.

  Phweew, phweew, phweew.

  The wind blew through the bunker past where we were standing.

  I raised my gun again, letting the front sight straight at Miach’s heart, the barrel pointed toward Miach.

  “Cian died. My father died. You killed them.”

  Miach nodded, her face severe. “I had to. Note that they were randomly selected from all potential targets.”

  “My father’s death wasn’t random.”

  “That’s true. Your father died for his beliefs.” She pointed at the gun in my hand. “What about you, Tuan Kirie?”

  I listened to my own voice speaking inside me. Would this voice go away if I lost my consciousness, my will? Would my consciousness, my individuality, disperse, leaving only a system behind? Leaving only a self-evident me? Would I do what I was supposed to do, never wondering, always working, my various functions all handled automatically?

  The harmonious brain is a brain with all uncertainty removed. No, discarded.

  With no uncertainty, there were no choices. With no choices, everything simply was.

  I understood that everything around me would look exactly the way it always had. If human consciousness had never done anything of great importance, its loss would change little.

  People go shopping, just like they did the day before.

  People go to work, just as they had the day before.

  People would laugh like they did the day before.

  People would cry like they did the day before.

  All reactions would be clear and simple. Doing things because they were what you were supposed to do.

  Wasn’t this just some rite of passage we all had to go through in order to create the coming eternity?

  I thought that maybe it was.

  No objections.

  ≡

  “So you wanted to go back to your life without a consciousness. To the way your people used to be.”

  Miach looked down
, then nodded slightly. “Maybe that’s true. Yes, I think you’re right.”

  “So by taking that away, maybe I can have my revenge.”

  “Huh?”

  Miach blinked. Revenge? It was like she hadn’t even once considered the idea the whole time I was making my way to her hiding place, carrying Cian’s and my father’s deaths with me.

  It was enough to make me want to laugh. She was Miach Mihie all right, this girl. Oddly enough, it was a relief.

  Say, Miach. You know how many times I’ve thought about killing you between the moment Cian Reikado’s face hit her caprese and when I found my way to your bunker in Chechnya?

  “Cian didn’t have to die. That’s why you called her to tell her she had to.”

  “You think?”

  “You had to justify your own consciousness, vis-a-vis a reality that had already been decided and could not be stopped.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  I nodded, steadying my grip on the gun. “That’s why I’m going to avenge Cian and my father, right here.”

  “How?”

  “I’m going to make the world you always wanted a reality. And I’m not going to let you be part of it.”

  Phweew, phweew, phweew.

  I pulled the trigger.

  Miach fell to the concrete floor with a thud.

  A shrill rush of air spilled from her mouth, along with a tiny voice seemingly wrung from her body that said, “Will you forgive me now?”

  “For Cian and my father?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve had my revenge.”

  I reached down and stroked Miach’s hair where she lay. A single rivulet of red blood running from one corner of her mouth was beautiful against her white skin. Her eyes looked weakly down at the floor where those men had reveled in their barbarism.

  “Please, take me with you.”

  “To where?”

  “A place where…I can see the Caucasus.”

  Miach was bleeding from the two holes my bullets had left in her chest.

  One for Cian.

  One for my father.

  I threw her over my shoulder and walked through the bunker. It was just like Miach always said. Like Uwe said. I didn’t care what happened to the world. No matter what the mobs crushing down on the pink-camouflaged soldiers and their useless nonlethal weapons were going to do. No matter how men with knives cut at each other. No matter if the old folks entered the final code to stop it all.