Harmony (4 page)

“Hey, Tuan, want to die with me?” Miach asked in her usual grand style. I looked around the room. Several of our classmates were still there, well within earshot. Miach was leaning over her chair, elbows on my desk.

Yes, it was a shocking thing for a high school girl to say, but to tell the truth, I wasn’t surprised. I’d had the feeling it was something she was going to ask me someday. It didn’t even surprise me that she chose such a public forum in which to ask. Nor would it surprise me if she had asked us to go right then. It had been clear for some time that suicide was our only way out of this place. We all agreed. Cian was standing right next to Miach, looking serious, waiting for my answer.

Now, I should explain that dying was no simple matter in those days. With the population so dramatically reduced, our bodies were considered public property, valuable resources to society, and as such they were something to be protected, or so went the publicly correct thinking.

In one of her many lectures, which she always delivered with that same nonchalant air, Miach had told us about how, a long time ago, the Catholics had been experts on the taboo against suicide. “You see, your life comes from God. You’re given it by God, whether you want it or not. That’s why mere humans weren’t allowed to throw that life away, like a shepherd doesn’t want his sheep offing themselves. People who committed suicide were reviled. They would bury them in the middle of an intersection so that they would never know the way up to heaven, not until Judgment Day. That was their punishment for betraying God’s trust.”

“I have a hard time imagining us being buried in an intersection,” Cian said with an innocent smile.

Every time Cian smiled it made me inwardly groan a little.
Miach ignored her and went on.

“And the successor to that Catholic dogma? Believe it or not, it’s us, with our all-benevolent health-obsessed society. Bodies once received from God are, under the rules of a lifeist admedistrative society, public property. God doesn’t own us anymore, everyone does. Never before in history has ‘the importance of life’ been such a loaded term.”

Miach was right, of course.

And that was why we had to die.

Because our lives were being made too important.

Because everyone was too concerned about everyone else.

Of course, it wasn’t enough to simply die. We had to die in a way that made a mockery of the health regime we were supposed to uphold by law. At least, that was what we thought
back then.

“A long time ago, there were kings. When people wanted to change something, they killed the king. Usually, the killing was done by everyone, but not everyone could govern because the flow of information wasn’t so good in those days. That’s why they made governments. Then, if you got angry enough, you could kill your government instead.”

The tone of Miach’s voice seemed to ring clearer as she told us this, more finely honed than usual. It had a beauty to it, enough to send shivers down my spine. It was like a blade—a
blade of ice.

“But what do we do now? In a post-governmental admedistrative society, there is no one to kill. Everyone is happy, everyone governs—the basic units of governance are way too small to target.”

Miach looked out the window toward the front gates where our classmates were now stepping out into the street, on their way back home. From the third floor of the school building, you could look down on everything.

“Admedistration. The medical conclaves. A gathering of people who have reached a consensus on a particular medical system. The Harmonics. While an admedistration might have councilors, they’re nothing like members of parliament used to be in the old governments. The councilors and commissioners just don’t have the concentrated power of the old kings. We’ve divided power over such a wide area that we are effectively powerless. Even if we wanted to fight the admedistration like the students of old, there’s no good government building for us to throw our
Molotov cocktails at.”

Cian frowned at that, a sudden unease coming over her. “So that’s why we have to commit suicide? That’s our attack on the system?”

Miach nodded firmly. “Exactly. Because we are important to them. Our future potential is their industrial capital.
We’re
the infrastructure. That’s why we’ll take our bodies, their wealth, away from them. That’s how we’ll tell them our bodies are our own. We’re no different from those who came before us; we’re still trying to fuck the system. It just happens to be the case that the best way to hurt them is to hurt ourselves.”

That was how Miach answered Cian’s worries.

Of course, I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t admit right here that most of the time how Cian and I felt was entirely subordinate to Miach’s charismatic personality. We basked in her glow, hoarding it for ourselves.

Knowing so much, and hating so much, she was an ideologue. You always knew where she stood, which made her very easy to follow.

I don’t imagine, even now, that I made my choice back then out of free will. I just had faith in Miach, who was always so clever, so well prepared. I knew she’d have the perfect way to strike back at the system. So when she brought her hand out in a clenched fist from her pocket and opened her fingers slowly, we knew with a cold clarity that it held our doom.

“See this pill? You only need to take one a day and it’ll completely shut down your digestive tract from your stomach all the way to your large intestine. One of these and your body will completely refuse any and all nutrition.”

“Where did you get it?”

I had no misgivings whatsoever about taking the pill. I asked out of sheer curiosity as to the route by which she had obtained it. For a moment I imagined that she had, against all odds, managed to find one of those morally depraved adults—that anachronistic, extinct breed—living somewhere, and he had rented her body, and as luck would have it, he was a shady pharma dealer.

“I made it. With a medcare unit,” Miach said, dashing my hopes. I knew she wasn’t lying, either. Why would she? Cian came up behind her, putting her hands on Miach’s shoulders, literally backing her up.

“Of course she did,” Cian said. “Miach knows how to use medcare to make poison strong enough to kill an entire city. Making some pills was easy compared to that.”

Without looking around, Miach reached up and gently laid one of her fingers on Cian’s left hand.

In a lot of ways Cian was Miach’s shadow. Like me, she felt uncomfortable in our world, like she didn’t belong, but at the same time Cian was basically a coward who would do anything you said if you said it loud enough. She lived her life in fear.

Miach cleared her throat. “Well, I don’t know about you two, but I’m dying.” She looked at each of us in turn. “Cian? Tuan? What’ll it be?”

I stared at the white pill in Miach’s outstretched hand.

This little white jewel would cut my body off from every bit of nutrition it needed. I could eat my breakfast, lunch, and dinner with everyone watching, while that tiny forbidden fruit led me unerringly down the path of starvation. If we had been adults, the WatchMe inside us would send an emergency malnutrition alert to a health consultant’s server, where it would yell and shout until the admedistration sent a fleet of ambulances to save us from ourselves.

So we had to do it before we became adults. In other words, right now.

Now was our chance. Now that we had met this genius, our savior, Miach Mihie.

If I passed up this opportunity, it would never come again, not for my whole life.

“I’ll do it.”

I don’t know how long I stood there looking at the pill before I answered. Cian looked a little reluctant herself, but she nodded too. The classroom was already empty except for us three. Taking the pills in our hands, we tossed them in our mouths and swallowed.

Of course, I didn’t die.

Thirteen years later, I was standing in the Sahara, blowing thick smoke from between pursed lips, waiting for Étienne and his gang to finish loading the crates into the rear compartment of our armored transport. The Tuareg—Kel Tamasheq—warrior was smoking one of the same cigars as the kind they had brought us. He was watching his men as they squatted on the ground a short distance away, opening a portable parabolic antenna.

“I’ve been meaning to ask for a while now, but what’s with the dish?”

I had seen them bring it every time they came to trade with us. It was an antique communication device, the kind that you needed to use mechanical headphones with to hear. An unusual sight for a member of modern society, who was used to listening to her playlist of tunes on an embedded jawbone receiver.

“Huh? That? It is for sending ultra shortwave transmissions.”

“Who listens to shortwave radio these days?”

“No one. Which is why we use it to communicate with our ally on the International Space Station.”

That was a surprise. I had assumed that the ISS—a relic of the now-defunct United States of America—had been scrapped when its founding nation broke apart in the Maelstrom.

“Really? I had no idea anyone was still up there.”

“Several of your admedistrations joined together to purchase it for the purpose of cultivating astronauts, you see. They’re using it as part of a program to train particularly gifted students. One of our youths managed to beat out ten thousand other applicants—” the Tamasheq warrior slipped back his sleeve, an actor striking a pose, revealing a vintage wristwatch on his arm— “and he is passing over our heads at this very moment.”

“I’m surprised they even let him in with his background, coming from a warring state and all.”

“He grew up in Mali. He is a citizen of the Republic of Mali.

We have many allies who are citizens of many countries. It is one of our strengths as a nomadic people.”

“But what does he tell you from space? ‘I have seen the Earth, and she is blue, like our turbans’?”

The moment I said it, the young man squatting by the dish with the bulky-looking headphones held up his hand. His face had gone pale.

The warrior glared at him. “Calm yourself. What have you heard?”

“We are getting a transmission…a bogey, a surveillance WarBird he thinks, flying toward our position. Probably Nigerian. But the silhouette is strange for a surveillance bird. He says they might be armed.”

Étienne and his gang tensed. If their armistice monitoring group was caught on video trading with the Kel Tamasheq—even if they were only trading immunization patches for tobacco and alcohol—it would look very bad.

I sighed. “Now I see why you always went to such lengths to specify the place and time of our little meetings.”

They were setting the times to coincide precisely with the orbit of that museum of a space station carrying their young spy inside. While we were monitoring the Tuareg, they were watching us too.

“Yes, without the support of our friend above, we would not be able to make these trades. This is a battlefield, you know. He is our spy satellite.”

The Kel Tamasheq warrior thrust out his hand, and I placed the memorycel in it. People with WatchMe installed could use their own skin as a storage medium, transferring data merely by touching fingers for a few seconds, but the Tamasheq had demanded we bring the data inside this little rectangular crystal. Only then would they make the trade. They still only trusted things you could see with your eyes here. It was a kind of animism. Something physical had to be exchanged for there to be barter, and that was it. Even when the medium was essentially
for show.

“This should work against the new infection that’s been spreading in the area. Just install it on your server and your WatchMe will block off the access routes that the disease’s prions are using.”

I should pause at this point to mention, somewhat belatedly, that the Kel Tamasheq people all had WatchMe installed too. Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression or conjured some romantic image of a primitive, pure people, unsullied by medical nanotech. The Tamasheq weren’t Mennonites or Amish. If something was good, they took it—in moderation. They were wise that way. If all it took was a brief injection, then sure, they’d install WatchMe in themselves.

So,

We had protected their server for them on several occasions. And now, we helped them by copying immunization program patches from our base server and trading them to them in secret.

In other words, our little illicit trade was saving lives.

All with programs filched from the admedistration.

.

“The deal is made.”

“And we’re out of time.” I gathered my long hair into a ponytail. “We’ll be heading back to our ‘temple’ now, before Niger finds us here.”

The Kel Tamasheq gave a hearty laugh. “If you hate your gods so, why not come live with us, woman of the medicine people? We treat our women with much respect. Especially now when there is war, women are very precious to us.”

“Thanks for the proposal, but I’ll pass.”

“For what reason?”

“For the very reason that I’m here in the first place—because I’m a coward.”

For three or four seconds, the Kel Tamasheq warrior looked at me in silence. To show that he understood and was sorry on my behalf.

I could talk the talk, but I was thoroughly unable to leave my admedistration, to escape the society into which I’d been born. No matter how much I wanted to leave. And why was this? In a word, fear. No matter how much I hated it, I couldn’t bear to see it all go away.