Harmony (26 page)

My goat was a slightly different beast than the ones they had ridden on, mine having been specially engineered for transporting goods in these mountains. The machine gun turret had been added on almost as an afterthought, and frankly I didn’t really see the point. I stood, returned my canteen to its sack on the goat’s back, checked the pistol in the holster at my side, and resumed my ascent.

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.”

04

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.

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.”