Harmony (16 page)

“I’m just not sure how to take this.” Of all the things I had anticipated this man telling me, a conspiracy theory was not one of them.

“I completely understand, but you’re going to have to believe me. We do not have much time left.”

“You mean there’s going to be another wave of suicides?”

“Or something like that, yes. On the day of the incident, this group performed a test of their system. Just a test, to see if the technology worked as intended. The test was a success—save for an unexpected mass wave of simultaneous suicides.”

“You mean to tell me that was an accident?”

I found it hard to believe that an organization founded on fear of the Maelstrom, no matter how megalomaniacal, would make a technology capable of ending so many lives and causing so much fear. Wasn’t that exactly what they would be trying to prevent?

“No, not an accident. According to our source, there is another group within this group. Though they share the same objectives, they are directly opposed to the larger group on the issue of the means to that end. A rogue faction, if you will.”

“So this ideological rift within the group was the trigger that caused all those deaths?”

“Rather, what we saw was one act in the confrontation between these two groups. The suicides were a power play by the rogue faction, if you will.”

A little office spat among a group of megalomaniacs, resulting in a mountain of corpses.

“Then why bring this to me?” I asked.

“In order to ask for your help, of course. Rather, we want to help you with your investigation. I’ll be frank. There are elements within Interpol that have not taken kindly to the Helix Inspection Agency inserting themselves into the investigation of the incident. There was quite a heated debate about it. The naysayers felt that this was strictly a criminal case, and that WHO, an admedistration monitoring agency, was using the incident as an excuse to make a grab for more authority.”

“They were probably right.”

Stauffenberg was first and foremost among the expansionists. I had once listened to her give a speech in which she claimed that the Helix Inspection Agency, as defenders of lifeism, had an obligation to deal with any and every threat to human lives or health.

“Even still, with what’s happened, and worse to come, cooperation seems to be the only choice. We do not know when they will make the next move. All we know is that we have to stop them before—excuse me.”

Vashlov put a hand to one ear. Someone calling him on his HeadPhone.

Unconsciously, I reached up and rubbed the back of my own scalp.

Right inside here.

Inside the gray matter in my skull.

Some old farts, in their fear of the Maelstrom, had built a little medicule network there for me. Our free will was the last thread of ourselves not yet outsourced. Yet there was a mechanism that could take even that away from me, a mechanism controlled by a group of people that didn’t believe in our society, not that they wanted us to believe in it. If that network suddenly ordered me to kill myself, then I would draw the gun I wore at my side and, without a single conflicting thought, shoot myself in the head. I found myself really wanting to know exactly how it would work when the time came.

This was the result of outsourcing all our bodily functions. By entrusting our bodies to others through WatchMe, we had reached the point where we could no longer support our own selves without those external mechanisms to help us.

Humans are good at dividing up labor.

Food must’ve been a very personal thing for most people in the beginning. Now, the whole process had been divided into so many stages, each with their own specialists. I doubted anyone today really understood the routes food took from its origins to their mouths.

Vashlov tapped me on the shoulder. “Got a news report coming in on Network 24. Check it out.”

I called up a media channel in one corner of my field of vision. I linked to Network 24 and immediately saw the emergency news report tag. A newscaster with a nervous look on his face began reading from the prompter on his AR.

“Good day, this is Edison Carter. What we are about to broadcast is the contents of a memorycel we received at our news bureau just moments ago. The memorycel contains a message from a person claiming responsibility for the recent mass suicide incident.”

“What’s this all about?” I asked Vashlov.

He shook his head in disbelief. “I wish I knew. We’ll just have to watch.”

The self-review committee at Network 24 had a reputation for being a little looser than other media outlets. A short while earlier, the image of a dead soldier appearing in a corner of one frame during a report on the violence in Chechnya had sparked an outcry against the station. Most other media outlets subjected everything they showed to an AI editor before broadcast in order to prevent any possibility of showing something emotionally traumatic. Relatively speaking, then, Network 24 was pretty extreme and as such not entirely worthless as a news source.

“We will begin playback now
,
” Edison Carter said. The screen went black.

I’m not sure when they’ll play this, so let me wish you a good morning, a good day, and a good evening.

It was a female voice, heavily modulated.

There was no picture. Only the words voice only in the middle of the screen.

I closed my eyes. Maybe that way I could hear a kernel of the real person—which could very well have been Miach Mihie.Besides, if there were no picture, what was the point of looking at it?

A lot of people have died.

A lot of people ended their own lives all at the same time.

I’m sure it was shocking.

I’m sure you’re frightened at the possibility of seeing someone die before your eyes.

We did this.

Our methods are, at present, a secret.

However, the framework for the method is already inside you, inside each of your brains.

It’s too late to take it out now.

You are all our hostages.

I tried to listen through the warbling blips of whatever masking process had been applied to the voice for a trace of Miach Mihie and was unsuccessful.

You already know what we are capable of.

You’re frightened. You’re angry. You are experiencing many emotions.

These emotions are real. Treasure them.

Our society has been engineered to suppress your emotions.

You are being crushed beneath words of kindness.

This is not written anywhere. It is not the law.

Yet it binds you all the same. Never has there been a generation so self-regulated. Never has there been a civilization so weighted down by rules not generated from within, but without.

No one can say what’s really on their mind. Since we were children, we have been told that we are vital resources to our society. Our bodies do not belong to us, they belong to society at large. They are public property.

Haven’t you had enough of it?

I am sure you have all heard about the rise in the suicide rate. You’re not the only one who wants to escape.

The message was a familiar one.

Miach’s words to me and Cian echoed in my head.

Words that had given a clear shape to our suffering.

We are going to create a new world.

In order to do that, we need to know who is capable of making change.

Within the next week, I want you each to kill at least one other person.

I don’t care what means you have to use.

I want you to prove that you’re capable of doing anything to serve your own ends. Prove that other people don’t matter.

Accept the fact that your life is the most important.Revel in it.

Those who are unable or unwilling to perform this small task will die.

You know we can follow through with this threat. You have seen what we can do.

If you should hesitate to take someone else’s life, even if it means saving yourself, then we will kill you without mercy.

That is, you will kill yourself.

We can do this with the press of a button.

For those who do not yet believe us, we will show you proof.

You will be able to see it for only a moment.

Watch closely.

“That is all the voice data we have received at Network 24.”The screen switched back to Edison Carter. He was reading from an AR script again. “We traced the origin of the message, however. The person or people who sent it used the ID of one of the recent mass suicide victims.” At that point, the star reporter of Network 24 casually reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a pen, and slammed it into his right eye.

Vashlov covered his eyes.

The AI censor kicked in.

Before Carter began scrambling his own brains on a global feed, the image cut out, replaced by scrolling text apologizing for the emotionally traumatic visuals, and urging all viewers to seek appropriate therapy as soon as possible. They even displayed the ID of the nearest therapeutic center. Like therapy would negate the fact that Carter had just committed suicide in front of the world.

“Shit, I can’t believe I just saw that. Shit!”

Vashlov was muttering under his breath.

On the battlefield, I had seen bodies with their heads blown off, abandoned corpses in advanced states of decay. As such, the image wasn’t a particularly shocking one, but the circumstances were more than enough to give me pause.

If this really was Miach’s doing, the girl needed serious therapy.She needed enough pharmaceuticals and counseling to rewire her brain.

I raced the car on to the airport. There was no time to waste.I had to get to Baghdad before the monster lurking beneath the heavy clouds of kindness awoke and bared its fangs.

02

I don’t belong in this world.

The first time I had that thought was during an admedistration morality session. I was still in middle school, so I went as an observer with my parents. I say “went,” but the session was in AR. The topics on the table began with some very nuanced, hard to define, and frankly meaningless points about the propriety of certain advertisements.Gradually though—I don’t recall the particulars of how it happened now—the discussion shifted to moral concerns about the use of caffeine.

I had always thought that tea was tea.

Coffee was coffee.

Except that, just like all wine contained alcohol, these beverages contained caffeine.

To this day I remember her clearly, the woman with a big voice who was running the show. I don’t remember her name. She began very demurely, waiting for her turn to take the floor. Yet when she spoke, her words were anything but demure.

“I was just wondering if there isn’t a moral problem with the taking of caffeine.”

According to her, caffeine was basically

“Caffeine is essentially addictive,” the woman said.

Very softly.

A gentle denunciation.

“It just seems to me,” she went on to say, “that there is something
indecent
about the effects of long-term use.”

“What about those who require the use of caffeine in their occupation?” asked my father, the scientist. This was why I was soon to witness my father being verbally pummeled in public. Which was odd, because as far as I could tell, what he had said was correct, common sense, and altogether noninflammatory.

But the woman’s argument was so in line with admedistration ideas of propriety, so modestly put—and so one-sided, so easy to understand, and so filled with determination.

Determination after determination.

People in the admedistrations liked other people to decide things for them. People who made decisions created an atmosphere. Scientists had always been bad at this. That was because the facts could be dry and were often complex; yet by necessity the truth must be plain enough to withstand repeated inquiry, all of which made it unappealing. So my father told me some time after the session had ended.

My father had said that certain occupations required the use of caffeine, and that there were certain kinds of stress that caffeine helped reduce.

“The arguments Mr. Kirie gives us,” the woman said, close to the end of the session, “are quite like the rationales given by those who clung to their tobacco and alcohol habits, even when everyone around them had abandoned the foul things.”

Not once did my father manage to get the word
moderation
in edgewise. Though caffeine wasn’t about to be wholly abolished, the atmosphere in the session clearly colored caffeine as a poisonous, indecent substance to be avoided.

I felt sick through most of the session.

Not an upset stomach. More of a spiritual queasiness. Like my mind wanted to vomit. To me, the woman was a menace, and I couldn’t understand why everyone in the session seemed to be nodding and swallowing the venomous words she spat out like candy.

“I know it’s not very realistic, but I have a dream that someday,” the woman said in closing, “someday caffeine will be entirely abolished.”

I regretted having asked my parents to take me with them to the session.