Itoh, Project: Harmony

“The monitoring we do on behalf of admedistrative society must not be allowed to itself incite more conflict. If word got out that we, who by all rights should be the upholders of lifeism and champions of long life and health, were indulging in such harmful substances as alcohol and tobacco, it would be a disaster.”

A disaster for whom , I wondered. It certainly wouldn’t bother me any. I wasn’t harming anyone with my secondhand smoke. And shouldn’t I be allowed to harm myself as much as I pleased? No , I immediately corrected myself. Even thinking that was verboten in this age of public correctness.

“What I want to know is how you kept your own WatchMe silent all this time. Any amount of alcohol consumption should trigger the medicules in your system, which would immediately inform the health supervision server—”

“Well, being out here in the sticks and all, the server does go off-line pretty frequently,” I said, as though my boss really needed an explanation of conditions here at the armistice monitoring camp. “And besides, we girls know a little magic. That is, those of us who still remember that we’re girls.”

“That’s very funny,” she said without a trace of humor in her voice. “I don’t know what underhanded means you used to get this contraband, but I will have you know what damage your actions have caused to our operations.”

“I already know: none.”

I clapped a hand on her shoulder as lightly as I could. In her crimson coat, Os Cara Stauffenberg quaked with rage. I ran my finger gently over the embossed snakes curling around the staff of knowledge on the WHO badge she wore. “I wouldn’t worry about your badge getting tarnished, Os Cara. Because you’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you.”

Os Cara clucked her tongue. It occurred to me that this was probably the most dramatic expression of disdain she, a dyed-in-the-wool member of admedistrative society, could muster.

“Of course I can’t go public with this.”

She glared at me. “If the authority of this agency were to be impugned, then all our efforts to make this world a healthier, more peaceful, more charitable place will have been wasted. Even in the short term, were I to go on the record about your little ‘party time,’ our monitoring operation here in Niger would lose any and all credibility overnight.”

“So sorry to hear that, Prime.”

At this point, Alpha seemed to realize that things might not be as terribly bad as he’d imagined them to be. I gave him a pat on the shoulder as well, saying, “I certainly hope nothing of the sort happens to our wonderful operation here.”

“I’m not finished!”

Alpha resumed his former state of rigid terror.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to take responsibility for what you’ve done, Senior Inspector Kirie. You will be returning home on the next available flight and remain until you’ve seen the error of your ways.”

“Home? You don’t mean Japan…”

No fucking way.

After all I’d done to escape that gulag—the overeating, the starvation, the loss of a friend—all ending in the pursuit of my current career flying from one war zone to another.

No fucking way.

“That’s right. Japan. I won’t have you using this battlefield for your recreation room. You betrayed us. I want you to go back and experience what it’s like to truly love and be loved by your neighbor, Tuan. You will learn how to be publicly correct.”

My boss set the bottle of wine down by one of Alpha’s terminals and strode out of the tent, leaving me rooted to the spot. I was already beginning to imagine the days of depression ahead of me. I would be living in Japan. The place I hated as a youth, the place Miach detested with all her heart. Japan.

“You’re incredible,” Alpha whispered, a sigh of relief escaping his lips. “Simply amazing. I can’t believe you got off with such a light punishment. I’d heard you were a powerhouse, Tuan, but that was something else. No wonder Étienne calls you his queen.”

I felt the sudden urge to slap the cheerfully babbling Alpha hard across the cheek, but instead of allowing myself to resort to violence, I picked up the wine and slammed the entire bottle of Château Petrus in one breath. A stream of the ruby liquid spilled from the side of my mouth and ran down my chin, splattering over my crimson Helix agent’s coat. Alpha swallowed, his momentary elation evaporating more quickly than the wine on my collar.

I needed this. I needed to be able to drink like this. It might be my last drink in a long time.

My heart sank.

Sayonara, Sahara.

Catch you around, Kel Tamasheq.

06

And so I found myself stranded in the desert called normal life. A vast wasteland of public correctness and people as resources.

Stuck in a sinkhole called harmony.

I could see it spreading out from the airport like an oily film on the land. Forming a gestalt that made me want to retch. I spotted clusters of residential buildings below, square little blocks in inoffensive pastels. Like tiny multiplying pixels of artificial life on a monitor. The PassengerBird I was on flexed its wings, tracing a soft circle through the air. An announcement sounded near my inner ear, telling me to prepare for landing.

An RPG comes flying out of nowhere, slamming into the side of the PassengerBird.

The giant bird flies into pieces, raining down its contents—the passengers—on the little Cubist residents far below. In death, the bird looks just like the WarBird I shot down over the Sahara. The men in suits spill out of its body cavity so lightly and evenly, just like in Golconde Rene Magritte painting, c. 1953 . On the ground, the residents waste no time flinging off their pretenses of charitable love to pick up baseball bats with which to knock the falling men back up into the air.

As the bird touched down on the runway I realized I had been daydreaming. The other passengers were already standing from their seats, getting ready to disembark. I grabbed my bag, left the bird, went through luggage screening, and spilled out with the rest of the bird droppings into a burgundy-colored airport lobby.

The moment that I stepped off the PassengerBird, the augmentedreality in my contacts kicked in. Just about everything in my field of vision had AR metadata associated with it. I glanced at the entrance to a café and saw the menu hanging in midair with a meter next to it telling me how many seats were empty and next to that some stars indicating favorable reviews.

Everything in our world had a user review attached to it.

Even people had little social assessment stars stuck on them.

Café de Paris in the airport lounge: four stars.

Tuan Kirie: four stars.

Cian Reikado: three.

“Tuan! Tuantuantuan!”

A little girl’s voice shouting my name.

Since I didn’t know any little girls, I was pretty sure it had to be Cian Reikado. She was one of the only people who knew I was coming back. I went to pick up my Helix agent code at the baggage counter, then turned to Cian, who was yelping and jumping with excitement. If she’d had a tail, she’d have been wagging it for sure. Some public metadata was attached to her body—the name of the admedistration she belonged to and the SA score she’d been assigned by her admedistration’s moral consortium.

“How’d you find me in that crowd?” I asked.

“What are you talking about, Tuan? You stand out in any crowd!”

“Oh?”

“You should really watch that—you probably attract enough attention as it is with your job and all. Wow, you’re really, uh, rough-looking too. No offense.”

“Comes with the territory. I can’t help it if battlefields always tend to be the deserts and the highlands and the swamps. It’s tough on the skin.”