Itoh, Project - Harmony

To be honest, I hadn’t been ready for the woman’s pained confession.

Even though, as a Helix agent, I was used to negotiating with admedistrations, the few big governments that refused to die, and the armed factions, I had no tools to deal with this kind of outpouring of raw emotion.

This was the kind of scene you expected in therapy sessions run by the admedistration community and the morality center. The world where everyone knew everything about everyone else. There was no shame in showing your emotions there. Everyone welcomed your grief with a smile and set about debating how to fix things on your behalf.A terrifying thought, I know.

That was the world I had fallen from, hard. The world from which I was estranged.

Confronted with the mother’s confession, I realized just how much of an outcast I was from Japan—no, from the entirety of the advanced admedistrative world.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t get emotional about this after so much time.”

“No, please don’t apologize.”

Miach’s mom shook her head. “I have to. My WatchMe just warned me my emotional state was beyond acceptable parameters for interfacing with others.”

“Ah, the public correctness monitoring module?”

“It’s a real lifesaver, having another pair of eyes inside me to help me through these things.”

A lifesaver, eh? Her WatchMe medicules had been monitoring her pulse and hormonal balance and noticed an aberration in her physical—and therefore mental—state, which it informed her of by sending an alert to her AR contacts. In other words, WatchMe was very subtly guiding not only her body but her mannerisms as well. It was the outsourcing of self-control. We didn’t have to worry about our own mental state if we could have something external measure everything for us. The invention of medicules had put the human body and moral precepts side by side on the same lab table.

And here this person was accepting as a perfectly natural part of her daily life the very precepts that Miach had railed against and even felt gratitude for the technology—though for all I knew, she might have secretly abhorred it. The program took signals sent from the body and transmitted morals in return. It was the kind of thing I detested with all my being.

No doubt Miach had felt much the same way.

It was one thing we shared, pure hatred toward the moral code over 80 percent of the people in the world had taken for their own.

“I was going to mention that on my way here, I thought I would stop by Miach’s grave and offer her some flowers, but I noticed she hadn’t been buried in the family plot. Based on what you’ve told me, am I right to assume that you returned her remains to Chechnya?”

The mother shook her head and, after taking a moment to compose herself, said, “No. Miach had, on her own initiative, signed a waiver donating her remains to science. It’s not such an unusual practice since the Maelstrom.”

After that chaotic time of rampant war, cancer, and viruses, the idea that offering your body to science was one of the most admirable things a citizen could do gained wide acceptance, until it was fairly common practice to include a medical donation in your will. Even though not a single governmental law or admedistrative article enforced or even suggested it, the custom to give one’s body to science still remained a popular one.

“And you didn’t put the liquid reduction of her remains in the grave either?”

“No—we gave those to a certain university professor. And that was her wish too. Someone in that city in the Middle East, the medical bubble place they always talk about, where all the admedistrations have their research labs—”

“You mean Baghdad.”

When the nation known as the United States had been the premier global power, back at the beginning of the century, the region around Baghdad had been a festering, war-torn shambles. But now it was like a medical mecca risen from the sands, the place where every medical organization with any clout wanted to have their headquarters.

“Yes, that’s the place, Baghdad. A researcher at one of the institutions there specifically requested Miach’s remains.”

“Could you tell me who this person was?”

“Yes. His name was Mr. Kirie. Nuada Kirie.”

I had no idea why my father’s name should come up now—my father who had chosen to leave his family for the protective shell of a research laboratory. The doubts that had been troubling me flared into full-blown chaos. Of course, my years of dealing with powerful military men and gangbangers in various unstable regions had taught me not to show fear or confusion on my face, and I didn’t now.

Nuada Kirie.

Funny that he had left me and my mother behind to devote himself to his research so soon after my failed attempt to die along with Cian and Miach.

“Why, that’s your name too, isn’t it? Could he be a relative of yours?”

“Not that I’m aware of. You wouldn’t happen to have his contact information, would you?”

“Yes, well, unfortunately I’m unable to contact Mr. Kirie. Something to do with lab security.”

“You mean you gave your only daughter’s remains to someone and now you can’t contact them? Not at all?” I asked, frowning a bit exaggeratedly. It occurred to me that making a show of putting some pressure on this woman might loosen her tongue.

“No, well…” she said.

“You do have a way of contacting him.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, though I was told not to tell anyone.”

“Don’t worry. I’m an investigator for an international organization. Legally speaking, our authority exceeds that of any medical industrial body.”

“Well, Mr. Kirie has an associate here in Japan. A man by the name of Saeki.”

Keita Saeki. Another familiar name. Another person I knew.

“Concerning the Possibility of Homeostatic Health Monitoring with Medical Particle (Medicule) Swarms and Plasticized Pharmalogical Particles (Medibase).”

Nuada Kirie, researcher

Keita Saeki, coresearcher

03

“So, why were you friends with Miach, Cian?”

We were on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building, waiting for our insalata di caprese . Cian seemed surprised by my question at first. Then she was silent, a thoughtful look on her face. I decided to wait patiently for her answer. It took a while, but before too long she nodded as though she had come to some sort of decision.

“You know the thing with the drug, the one that cuts off nutrition. I was the one who ratted us out. I told my parents.”

Nothing. No anger. Our suicide pact felt like ancient history by that point, the act of three little girls thirteen years ago, bound together only by a shared hatred of the world. Years later, I could think about it pretty objectively, and I honestly couldn’t blame Cian for bailing.

“No kidding.”

“You’re not angry?”

“Come on, we were kids. It’d take way too much effort to be angry with you now.” I smiled and urged Cian to keep talking, not realizing at the time where that conversation would lead.

“Thanks.”

“I guess I should thank you. You saved my life.”

“No. I betrayed both of you. And I couldn’t save Miach.”

“You shouldn’t carry that one around with you. Don’t. I want to hear the rest of this story.”

Cian fell silent again. I figured she had a lot of pieces to put together before she could even talk about these things— things she’d probably never told a soul before now.

“See,” she said at last, “I stopped taking them, the pills. After only a day or two. I was scared. I felt myself getting thin and weak for the first time. I didn’t have WatchMe installed back then of course, none of us did, but my parents had a health consultant that put together a life plan for all of us. The medcare unit kept us in tip-top shape all the time. I mean, I’d never even had a headache at that point.”