Itoh, Project - Harmony

Okay, everyone, I’d like to start today’s session.

Should we really kill others so that we can survive?

Should we use knives or blunt instruments?

No one here has a gun, do they?

I had a hard time imagining it. Yet if they didn’t deal with the matter head on, what was left but empty platitudes? Calm down, everyone is going to be okay—even when they knew they wouldn’t be. This wasn’t something you could discuss in public. This was a decision everyone had to make on their own. At this moment, everyone in the world was being tested.

Just thinking about it made me grit my teeth and start fiddling with my fingers. It was times like this you really needed some nicotine.

It had been several days now since I’d had a smoke, and I missed it. I couldn’t eat to compensate either, or I’d get fat, which would draw unwanted attention. Being fat was even worse than having bad skin. Deviations from standard physique really stood out when everyone was listening so attentively to their health consultant’s advice and following their perfectly designed lifestyle plans to the letter. The range of acceptable body types grew narrower every year.

Q:How long will this game go on?

A:We want to keep everyone playing until the body fat ratio of everyone in the world is plus or minus 1 percent of everyone else of their own gender. There are several ways to quit the game along the way, such as death, death, or our favorite, death.

Maybe the ones who had killed themselves just wanted out.

Heidrich and Himmler tried to eliminate obesity among the SS, Professor Saeki said. Himmler’s dream was that one day, all Germans would be vegetarians.

Maybe everyone wanted out of the game, but the atmosphere of conformity that society generated was too hard to break free of, and eventually, they gave up trying to quit. I had stayed in, myself, but in ways that didn’t require me to be serious about it at all. This meant that I had to spend most of my time on the fringes, tromping across battlefields.

Baghdad

Capital city of Iraq. Located in the middle of Iraq on the Mesopotamian plain. Baghdad is an old city, built during the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate and nearly destroyed in a wave of terrorist attacks against a U.S. occupying force stationed there following the second Gulf War at the beginning of this century. After the Maelstrom, Baghdad reinvented itself as a medical industry mecca. Tax breaks favoring medical investors and laws allowing the testing of experimental treatments on humans made the city an attractive place for medical industrial combines, medical think tanks, and research organizations, all who raced to establish their headquarters here, giving rise to the city’s nickname, “Medical Dubai.”

I looked through the passenger compartment and saw that, indeed, most people were somehow tied to the medical industry.

Of course, when I thought about it, it was difficult to find someone in our modern society who didn’t have a connection to some sort of medical service. I was reminded that my Helix agent ID made me stand out like a sore thumb. Especially with me standing up here, doing caffeine.

I scrunched down into my gelatin seat and watched as the PassengerBird wheeled through the sky. The seat twisted beneath me, absorbing the extra Gs as we descended to the Baghdad landing deck.

≡

It didn’t take long for the first cracks to appear in the world’s facade.

While I was in the PassengerBird an Italian man hanged himself: Luigi Vercotti, a volunteer resource manager in the Weiland Admedistration.

Vercotti had a six-year-old son and a thirty-eight-year-old wife. He had made a loop in a necktie while his wife and child were out shopping, tied it to a rafter, and kicked the small crate he’d been standing on out from under his feet.

The weight of his entire body falls on his neck.

The carotid artery begins to scream under the pressure.

The brain ceases to function in less than ten seconds’ time.

Then, gradually, the heart. stops. beating.

Inside his body, WatchMe was blaring with emergency messages for the medical server. Even when it was all over, the medicules would keep racing about until they ran out of energy from furiously signaling that there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen getting to the brain. Seen from the outside, death was a very gradual process of cell decomposition. It took time. Death didn’t happen in an instant.

Miach once showed me a picture scroll from the twelfth century or so called the “Nine Faces Poem.”

It consisted of nine illustrations showing a woman who had died. Her body gradually changed color, became bloated, then began to rot. The scroll ended with various birds and animals coming to eat her. The pictures were real, raw. It was hard to imagine the thing had been drawn so long ago. I had no idea how Miach had gotten her hands on such obviously emotionally traumatic material. Though I assumed she was capable of pretty much anything that was illegal.

“At the time when this was written, death was everywhere,” Miach said. “It takes time for a person to die, lots of time. When we go to someone’s great-grandfather’s or great-grandmother’s funeral these days, they have that case for melting and sterilizing the body. But back then, they put the body in a coffin and put the whole thing in the ground. You’ve probably never even seen a coffin, have you?

“Even when they processed the bodies, they didn’t take them to a reduction center to have them converted into harmless goop, they actually burned them. When they said ‘dust to dust,’ they really meant it.”

The idea that human death comes with brain death is a pretty recent one. From the time when people started thinking that we were our brains.

The moment I stepped off the bird in Baghdad, a call came in from the local Helix Agency office. I opened the message in my call box and I was in a real-time AR feed. There were reports from the Italian police in a document list and feeds with chatter about an incident that had happened thirty minutes prior. More was coming in: evidence, witness statements, etc.

“Is this the work of our mastermind or masterminds?” Someone in AR asked. Stauffenberg was there. She shook her head and indicated to all of us that we should read the suicide note posted in evidence.

“He left a note?” someone else said, surprised. No one had left anything in the earlier wave of suicides, with the possible exception of Cian Reikado.

The suicide note was a simple affair.

That was all.

“This is a new development. We do not think our mastermind was involved,” Stauffenberg said.

I had to agree. This wasn’t the doing of whoever had sent that memorycel to Network 24. This was someone who had taken that news report seriously and decided to take their own life before the “mastermind” could take it for him. It wasn’t an entirely outrageous decision.

Stauffenberg asked about media coverage and was informed that at present the only people other than the family who knew about the suicide were the local Italian police, Interpol, and the Helix Inspection Agency. Still, they would probably only be able to keep it under wraps for a few days at most. After that, the Werther effect would sweep the globe.

That was why they were giving the media a gag order, to keep would-be Werthers from popping up. Incidentally, the Werther effect refers to multiple linked suicides after a widely publicized one. Why did I know this mostly useless fact? Because Miach Mihie had told me.

“See this?” Miach held up a book. “ The Sorrows of Young Werther . This book killed a lot of people. Impressive, isn’t it?”

How does a book kill people, I asked her. “You mean someone hit them with it?”