Itoh, Project - Harmony

“I’m okay,” I told the politician and went a short distance down the train car. Cian caught up to me, a worried look on her face.

“You shouldn’t have walked away like that. It’s rude. She’s an admedistration councilor somewhere.”

“I know. I saw the AR. Sorry.”

“I think you’re just exhausted from work, Tuan. It must be hard, doing all that. But you’re really making a contribution to society.”

Me, making a contribution to society.

Making a contribution by going to a battlefield where I could smoke.

Making a contribution by consciously choosing not to be part of society—where I undoubtedly would have either slashed my own wrists or cut into someone else a long time ago.

Which was how I was able to agree with Cian, without a trace of sarcasm, that I was indeed making a great contribution to society.

My path and Cian’s had diverged sharply after Miach’s death. For Cian, all the enmity she had felt toward society, her family, her hometown, and school had passed. For her it was like a rite of passage, a phase everyone went through before returning to a standardized life. For me, I had gone on collecting the knowledge I surely would have gotten from Miach were she still alive, and on the surface, I too appeared to be conforming, just like Cian. My grades kept climbing until I took Miach’s former place at the head of the class. In a sense, I had become Miach’s doppelgänger.I was becoming Miach Mihie.

Cian wasn’t becoming Miach. She was joining a club—a club at least nine out of ten Japanese belonged to. A club with tightly defined body fat ratios and stable immune systems and known RNA transcription error rates.

All while I went from party zone to party zone. Battlefield to battlefield.

From airport to airport.

Cigar to cigar.

Bottle to bottle.

Except this time, I’d gone from Château Petrus to insalata di caprese , in a place where there was little likelihood of seeing a single smoke or drink.

I had said goodbye to the depressing, dizzying subway and now sat enjoying a healthy meal in an Italian restaurant with my old friend.

There were slices of tomato burying water buffalo cheese that had been completely drained of fat, with a light sprinkling of olive oil on top. We were on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building. The meals here were noteworthy for each bearing a slight risk to the diner.

When you ordered a plate, the menu displayed your total calorie intake and any potential risk of chromosomal damage you might suffer from consuming the food. Every single item on the menu had a warning attached. Once you had read the risk information to your satisfaction, you could order what you wanted to eat, within the prescribed limits set for you by the health consultant on contract with your admedistration.

There were a few other people in the restaurant, but not too many. Everyone sitting around the marigold tablecloths were just like the people I had seen in the subway, each well within the margins of a healthy Japanese body.

“It’s been a long time since we ate together,” Cian said, watching the server arrange our insalata . It occurred to me that since the day we had both tried to throw our lives away and failed, Cian and I hadn’t eaten together once.

“No kidding.”

“It’s a little strange, actually, being here with just the two of us.”

I looked out the window at the view from the sixtysecond floor.

The view that Miach wanted to mar.

The view that Cian had gotten used to.

The view I had escaped from.

“Actually, I think this might be the first time we’ve ever eaten together without Miach. Just the two of us, I mean.”

“I think I ate alone with Miach a few times,” I said, “ before she brought you into things.”

“Yes, I think you’re right. You were friends before I met you, weren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t call us friends. We didn’t find each other. Miach pretty much grabbed me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I was walking along one day and she literally ran up and grabbed me. Remember the story about the jungle gym?”

“Oh, right.”

“Wasn’t it pretty much the same way with you, Cian? With me she asked me whether I knew why the jungle gym twisted and warped like it did.”

“Maybe she was casting a net.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, she was sitting in the park reading a book, right? Maybe she was waiting for someone to notice her? A girl like me or you.”

Miach, waiting for someone to notice her? Something about it didn’t fit with the image I had. Miach hated everything about healthy society. She hated how everyone worried about everyone else, offering help whether it was asked for or not. It didn’t make sense for her to want out of the system and then go looking for friends. I told Cian I didn’t agree.

“Huh? Why?”

“I just think you’re wrong about her. Miach wasn’t looking for friends, she was looking for kindred spirits—comrades in arms.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Not really. They’re both kinds of acquaintances, in a loose sense of the term, but the bond between kindred spirits isn’t friendship per se . It’s more like the bond between fellow soldiers.”

Picking up knife and fork, I cut off a bite-sized chunk from my insalata . Cian was looking at me, clearly trying to comprehend what I was saying and just as clearly failing.

“See, Miach didn’t want friendship,” I continued. “She wanted someone to fight by her side. You can’t fight a war alone, you know.”

“The more the merrier?”

“You bet. Of course, it’d be a lot easier if she could find someone who already shared a lot of the feelings she had about things. So you’re right in that she was lying in wait for us, just for a slightly different reason.”

“We weren’t really the soldiers she hoped we would be, were we, then. At least, I wasn’t.”

Cian was probably right. Miach clearly identified the enemy and charged ahead all by herself. We were basically no better than deserters.

If Miach had been saved as we had been, would she be sitting here today, eating lunch with us? Would she have a smile for her former soldiers who fled the front lines? I had no idea.

It was then that I noticed Cian looking at her plate with a strangely expressionless face. It was bizarre. Like her plate was a pool, and she was watching something swim at the bottom. Her eyes remained fixed on one spot, unmoving. I was about to ask what was wrong when Cian opened her mouth, her eyes still fixed on her caprese .

“I’m sorry, Miach,” she whispered, then suddenly, her table knife was in her hand. Before I had time to wonder what she was doing, Cian had thrust the tip of the knife into her own throat.

“Ehgu,” said a strange voice from Cian’s mouth.

Summoning some strength I never would have imagined to be in her, she twisted the table knife inside her throat and brought it straight through her carotid artery and out one side. The knife couldn’t have been that sharp. Her strength was unbelievable. It was as if her neck had been a tree trunk, and she had cut halfway through it with one blow of a hatchet.

Blood sprayed from her neck.

The blood splattered all over the interior of the Italian restaurant on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building, painting the walls in patches of somber red. A shower of blood caught the server—who had just been coming to our table to fill our water glasses—directly in the face. He passed out. >It all happened in a single, endless moment. All I could do was stare. Blood flowed down onto her plate, mingling, but not blending with, the olive oil dripping down from her salad.