Harmony

by Project Itoh

  I brought Miach out to the corner of the bunker where it stuck out over the side of the mountain like a stage. Snow came drifting in through the open entranceway.

  White snow on the black mountains.

  I saw them stretching off into the distance, their crowns capped with ice.

  “Will you stay and watch?”

  “Watch what?”

  “Watch my consciousness end.”

  I nodded.

  I had fired the bullets. They were fired by no one else’s will but mine.

  I did it. I did it.

  Me.

  The last white puff of breath came from Miach Mihie’s mouth.

  Her body, her brain, lost their warmth, and her consciousness— that which made her Miach—faded, thanks to that simple, ancient mechanism known as death. It didn’t make a difference that her consciousness had been an emulation in her cerebrum.

  I stood in the whirling snow that came inside the bunker for a moment.

  The sound of a drop of blood falling from Miach’s spent shell brought me back to my senses.

  “It’s cold here,” I said to the backdrop of the mountains, holding Miach in my arms.

  I felt a cold creep across my cheeks.

  I wondered where my body ended and the cold air began.

  The boundary was already vague in my mind.

  Phweew, phweew, phweew, phweew.

  Goodbye, me.

  Good

  bye,

  m—

 

 

 

  me

 

 

  <?Emotion-in-Text Markup Language:version=1.2:encoding=EMO-590378?>

 

  //

 

 

  This is the last day of human consciousness.

  The day that several billion “me”s ceased to exist.

  This text is a story written from the viewpoint of one of the Homo sapiens involved with these events.

  This text has been tagged with etml 1.2. If you have compatible emotional textures installed in your texture reader, you will be able to reenact all of the emotions referred to in the text, as well as experience meta-functions at certain points as you make your way through. At present, the etml embedded in this text serves only as a trigger for you to reproduce the various emotional functions left behind in the brain. As humanity is perfectly socialized at present, there are few situations that call for any great display of emotion, either positive or negative.

  ≡

  Let me tell you about what happened after the Caucasus.

  Shortly after Tuan made her way down the mountain, the old folks decided to destroy consciousness and thereby equalize all members of society at once. Those elders with the authority went to their own rooms and entered their fragments of the code into their terminals. At that moment, the angels took up the hymn of Harmony and spread their wings before every person with WatchMe installed, all over the world.

  When the angels’ wings touched the peoples’ heads, their consciousness and wills were gone.

  In this new world, everything was self-evident, with nothing left to be chosen.

  We are alive.

  In a world where everything is as it should be.

  No wondering, no choices, no decisions. Something very close to heaven.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  The riots stopped immediately.

  As though they had suddenly remembered what they were doing, everyone went back to their roles within the social system.The several billion people in the world with WatchMe installed had ceased being animals.

  We finally arrived at the perfect social existence we had been heading toward in fits and starts since antiquity.

  It was then that the sociology and economics studies of the previous age, when mankind had been partially animal, fell apart in the course of a night. When a perfectly purified and adapted man became the smallest unit of a social existence, sociology and economics transformed into pure logic.

  On the surface, of course, nothing changed.

  People cried as though they were sad and raged as though they were angry. But these actions carried the same value as the mimicked emotional responses a robot would have had in the previous era. All people had lost their inward minds.

  Mankind was in perfect harmony with its medical industrial society.

  The instant the old folks had entered their codes and the Harmony program had begun to sing, suicide disappeared from human society. Nearly all battles ceased. The individual was no longer a unit. The entire social system was the unit. By losing its sense of self and self-awareness, society had been freed from the pain it suffered because its systems had relied on imperfect humans, arriving for the first time at a perfect bliss.

  I am a part of the system, as you are part of the system.

  No one felt any pain about that any longer.

  There was no “me” to feel pain.

  I had been replaced by a single whole, by “society.”

  The age when consciousness had been a valued facet of humanity was long past.

  Though it is hard to estimate now, the age when “I” and “consciousness” and “will” had played an important role in making decisions was not a short one. For modern man, in perfect accordance with the system, there is no need for icons such as those the Homo sapiens called gods and heroes, yet there can be no harm in learning about these things.

  Once there were two women named Miach Mihie and Tuan Kirie.

  They were the last to pay their respects to our “selves.”

  “Goodbye, me.

  “Goodbye, soul.

  “Though we may never meet again, goodbye.”

  Those are the last words Tuan whispered, just before her WatchMe went online and nonconsciousness fell upon her. Words to put at ease several billion souls about to be lost.

  Is there is a heaven on this earth?

  If mankind can truly ever touch something perfect.

  This is probably the closest thing to heaven we, as vertebrates patched together from a long string of evolutionary changes, can hope to achieve. To climb the ladder to a place where the self and society become one.

  Now, we are happy.

  So

  so

  happy.

 

 

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With thanks to my parents and uncle and aunt, who

  were there for me in my time of need.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Keikaku (Project) Itoh was born in Tokyo in 1974. He graduated from Musashino Art University. In 2007, he debuted with Gyakusatsu Kikan (Genocidal Organs) and took first prize in the “Best SF of 2007” in SF Magazine. He is also the author of Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots, a Japanese-language novel based on the popular video game series.

  After a long battle with cancer, Itoh passed away in March 2009. Itoh revised Harmony while in the hospital receiving treatment for the disease.

  HAIKASORU

  THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE

  HARMONY BY PROJECT ITOH

  In the future, Utopia has finally been achieved thanks to medical nanotechnology and a powerful ethic of social welfare and mutual consideration. This perfect world isn’t that perfect though, and three young girls stand up to totalitarian kindness and super-medicine by attempting suicide via starvation. It doesn’t work, but one of the girls—Tuan Kirie—grows up to be a member of the World Health Organization. As a crisis threatens the harmony of the new world, Tuan rediscovers another member of her suicide pact, and together they must help save the planet…from itself.

  ROCKET GIRLS BY HOUSUKE N
OJIRI

  Yukari Morita is a high school girl on a quest to find her missing father. While searching for him in the Solomon Islands, she receives the offer of a lifetime—she’ll get the help she needs to find her father, and all she need do in return is become the world’s youngest, lightest astronaut. Yukari and her teen friends, all petite, are the perfect crew and cargo for the Solomon Space Association’s launches, or will be once they complete their rigorous and sometimes dangerous training.

  THE OUROBOROS WAVE BY JYOUJI HAYASHI

  Ninety years from now, a satellite detects a nearby black hole scientists dub Kali after the Hindu goddess of destruction. Humanity embarks on a generations-long project to tap the energy of the black hole and establish colonies on planets across the solar system. Earth and Mars and the moons Europa (Jupiter) and Titania (Uranus) develop radically different societies, with only Kali, that swirling vortex of destruction and creation, and the hated but crucial Artificial Accretion Disk Development association (AADD) in common.

  SUMMER, FIREWORKS, AND MY CORPSE BY OTSUICHI

  Two short novels, including the title story and Black Fairy Tale, plus a bonus short story. Summer is a simple story of a nine-year-old girl who dies while on summer vacation. While her youthful killers try to hide her body, she tells us the story—from the point of view of her dead body—of the boys’ attempt to get away with murder. Black Fairy Tale is classic J-horror: a young girl loses an eye in an accident, but receives a transplant. Now she can see again, but what she sees out of her new left eye is the experiences and memories of its previous owner. Its previous deceased owner.

  VISIT US AT WWW.HAIKASORU.COM