Itoh, Project - Harmony

What I had found was middle ground between chaos and regulation, a limbo where I could hang for eternity.

I had sometimes felt like I was Miach’s doppelgänger.

But that wasn’t true at all. I had merely become the person I imagined Miach would have become if she had to live in my world.

“The reason I took Miach was, for one, because she was a perfect confluence of the various stressors our society creates. If we could bend Miach’s obdurate will and steer it off its collision course with death, then we could control anybody. That was the thought. In those days, we picked up a lot of kids like her and put them into treatment. We gathered the ones that wanted to kill themselves—especially the ones who overate or refused to eat, the ones who wanted to watch themselves grow weak and die. Our goal was to create a harmonized will inside the human brain. We called it the Harmony program. The experiments we performed on kids like Miach were tests-to-destruction, of a sort. We were seeing how far Harmony could go.”

I felt an irrational anger swelling up inside me. But not because of the tests they performed on Miach.

I wanted to know why they hadn’t tested me.

Of course, I knew precisely why. They needed someone who was really, deeply, fundamentally without hope. They probably had their eyes on hundreds of emergency morality centers. There were plenty of kids back then who had attempted suicide more than once, just as there were plenty of them now.

With Miach, my father had found his rock bottom.

He had seen the despair in her eyes.

He saw that she was, as Cian had said, standing on the edge of a cliff.

That was what my father had to control, or at least attempt to control.

That was the reason he had abandoned me and my mother and come here to Baghdad. I had to accept that. Yes, I was feeling jealous. Children always got upset when they weren’t chosen for something. Still, at the same time, what they had done was beyond grotesque.

Despairing kids by the dozen.

“How could you?”

My father nodded grimly. “It wasn’t easy. But if we didn’t do something, those children were a grave danger to themselves. All of them had repeatedly tried to take their own lives, and one day, they very well might have succeeded.”

“Nice try, but you’re just taking a consequence and calling it an objective.”

“True enough. Nor were our results by any means perfect.”

“What do you mean?”

“Harmony had a very serious side effect we didn’t anticipate— though, in hindsight, some simple logical reasoning should have made it obvious. As it was, we never saw it coming.”

Suddenly, it occurred to me what he was going to say.

He was right. Logically speaking, it was obvious. If the feedback web reached perfect harmony and all decisions could be made without any conflict and all actions taken clearly, what would that mean? It would mean nothing less than “I” was on the line.

“You killed consciousness.”

06

The death of consciousness.

My father’s eyes opened wide. For moment, he seemed at a loss for words.

“That’s right. How did you know?”

“Because I’ve heard from three people now what consciousness really is.”

The answer came out so smoothly it surprised even myself.

“That’s right, the conference. If all the participants have the same opinion, and all of their roles are perfectly aligned, then why hold a conference at all? If the feedback web does not plot our values on a hyperbola, but instead uses a logical, exponential curve, this is perfect harmony, in other words a state without any consciousness. It was something we couldn’t detect in our tests on animals.”

So my father had been trying to create a self-evident person, perfectly adapted to the stresses of admedistrative society. For someone whose every desire was self-evident, there was no need to make decisions. If their feedback web worked on clear, logical values, no will was needed to choose between one thing or the other. Consciousness was no longer required.

It almost made me laugh to think that such an obvious outcome hadn’t occurred to anyone in my father’s research group.

The mingled smells of spices and things cooking floated down toward the river from the direction of Abū-Nuwās. I spotted the boys again with their dog, running in and out of the water.

“We announced our findings to the other researchers and investors in the working group, that perfect harmony invariably meant the absence of consciousness. That consciousness was indeed only a mechanism for choosing between the various agents of desire teeming in our subconscious, the result of conflicts that required conscious thought to resolve, and the acting upon those conflicts. These choices were obvious to a perfectly harmonious will, thereby removing the need for a will to determine actions. We were chasing after the perfect human but ended up killing consciousness, for it was no longer needed.”

It was ironic. Our souls were nothing more than the product of a hyperbolic evaluation system we had developed over the course of our evolution. Perfect humans didn’t need souls.

“What happens when you lose your consciousness? Do you just sit there all day in your chair, drooling?”

“Nothing of the sort. You go shopping, you eat, you enjoy entertainment—you merely no longer have to make decisions what to do at any given time because everything is self-evident. It’s the difference between having to make choices and having it all be obvious to you. That’s all it is. That’s what divides the world of the consciousness and the world without. People have absolutely no problem living without consciousness or will, Tuan. They live their lives as normal. People can be born, grow old, and die without consciousness. Consciousness has very little to do with culture, really. From the outside, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether someone has a consciousness or is merely acting as though they did. However, because their system of values is fashioned to be in perfect harmony with society, there are far fewer suicides, and the kinds of stress we find in our admedistrative society disappear completely.”

So Miach and presumably these other kids had experienced this in the tests. They had experienced being without a consciousness.

All the billions of people on this earth had, at some point in their ancestry, along the long path of evolution, obtained what we call a consciousness. Evolution was a very haphazard thing. Only the genes well suited to a particular environment survived. The result of these patched-together adaptations was the species of human as we knew it now, each one of us possessing that curious byproduct of evolution we called a consciousness.

“When she came back, Miach said it had been pure ecstasy,” my father said with a wry chuckle. “While she was without consciousness, she ate normally, studied, spoke with us, and lived life as normal. When we brought her consciousness back, Miach didn’t remember a thing about her time during the test. She only had the sensation that she had been in a wonderful, joyous place.”

That made sense to me. You couldn’t look at dogs and not think they were, generally speaking, much happier than people. Someone once said that the bird that freezes upon the branch never knows suffering. What Miach had experienced was the state of mankind long before we had obtained consciousness, long before we got lost in the labyrinthine world of introspection and reflection.

The sun was sinking below the horizon now. I reached out as if to touch it with my fingers. People with perfect judgment do not require a consciousness, so it does not exist.

“And you tried to do this to everyone in the world? You were going to steal consciousness from everyone who was stupid enough to install WatchMe?”