Itoh, Project - Harmony

“No—we weren’t,” my father said, beginning to walk back up the bank in the direction of the street. “We could not just make the decision to eliminate consciousness. For one, I was terrified of the thought. To lose who I am, my own consciousness…In a sense, it’s like dying. We didn’t have the right to decide whether or not to impose something like that on billions of people.”

“I suppose it depends on what death is,” I said.

I admit that I shared an inclination to think of my self as my consciousness. The consciousness had the ability to make predictions and to control and order the body and mind, and it was easy to think of that as being everything. Though I was sure my body saw things differently.

We were back in the heat of the crowd up on the main street. Lights had gone on, bare bulbs illuminating the open shop fronts. It wasn’t just restaurants—there were places selling cooking wares and fabrics and carpets. People of different occupations bustled about in the midst of mingled smells from the many stoves and grills.

“We asked WHO and a few of the admedistrations to make a decision,” my father was saying. “In the end, we settled on a compromise, that we would install the system in everyone, but not activate it. That’s right, the medicule network necessary to control our feedback web is already in place in your brain, as it is in mine. If ever mankind should threaten to sink back into the chaos that was the Maelstrom, then, as an emergency measure, we can activate Harmony.”

Praise be to God. Though none of us asked, we have received. An automatic hallelujah device in our brains. Stuck right onto the synapses of our midbrain, never to let go or be removed. I could hear the choir singing now.

Ever since God had given us our self-awareness, it had done nothing but torment the suicidal and the literary among us, and now we were free to throw it all away. Free to return in primal ecstasy to the Kingdom of Heaven.

Hallelujah.

“So you gave someone the power of life and death over our consciousnesses and stole Miach’s consciousness away from her? You’re worse than I thought.”

“I thought you’d say something of the sort—though admittedly, I never expected to hear that from the despairing little girl you used to be. I’m sure most people wouldn’t want to lose that part of their brain that recognizes ‘me’ as ‘me.’ No matter what the potential cost to society. Which is why the old folks in our group, in their fear of the chaos that was the Maelstrom, put their plan into action without any public discussion or any morality session review.”

If these old folks wanted it, the human race could have its consciousness taken away.

We could all become people free of our useless consciousness, all doing precisely what we should be doing at all times.

We could upgrade to the newer model. Homo perfectus .

“So if you wanted to—”

“Yes, but right now, we do not. No matter how big a mountain of suicides our gentle society creates, there has to be a societal solution for this. Because we believe this, our fingers have never once strayed toward the Harmony button. Believe me, we don’t want this to happen.”

“But Miach Mihie does?”

My father stopped and picked up a kettle from a stand out in front of one of the shops. He stared at it. “Tuan. Have you ever heard of the island of sign language?”

I blinked and said that I hadn’t. “That’s kind of a sudden change of topic, don’t you think?”

“The people who first colonized Martha’s Vineyard—that’s an island off the American coast—were cut off for some time from the mainland, and there was a lot of inbreeding. This resulted in several families where both parents had a recessive gene for deafness, and in another generation or two, hardly anyone on the island could hear at all. It was more unusual to have your hearing than not. So, everyone on the island communicated via sign language. Sign language became their mother tongue. And no one was the worse for it. There, a person with hearing—which we take to be the norm—was instead a radical departure from the norm. Their culture did not require a sense of sound.”

“I’m still not sure what this has to do with our conversation.”

“It has to do with Miach Mihie.”

“Don’t tell me that she was deaf—or wait, that she had some sort of consciousness impairment, like those people had a hearing impairment?”

“No, she had a consciousness. However, it was different from ours in that she had formed her consciousness sometime after her birth.”

After her birth?

“You mean, she was born without a consciousness?”

“That’s correct.” My father tapped the kettle he held with one fingernail. Ding. The clear, high tone echoed in my skull. “Several decades ago, in the midst of the conflict between Russia and Chechnya, a minority ethnic group was discovered. This was a completely new group as far as the scientific community was concerned, mind you, not appearing in any records until then. Though their clothing, food, culture, and language had all been influenced by the surrounding peoples, they avoided close relations with any of them, maintaining a small community in a rugged mountainous region, where they had been inbreeding for many generations.”

“Wait, Dad, are you saying—”

“I’m saying that these people shared a common recessive trait. It’s a trait that shows up very rarely in the general population, and the chances of two people with it marrying are so slim that there has never been any observations made of this occurring. The trait of which I speak is a missing gene—the gene responsible for consciousness. I’m sure that of the billions of people in the world, there are a few born without the ability to form a consciousness, but in this Chechen minority group, nearly everyone lacked a consciousness.”

“But then how did they live or develop a culture?”

“After we found them, we ran them through several tests. They were extremely adept at logical thinking. Their value system was not like our irrational hyperbola, which attributes too much value to that which is right before us. They did not make choices. MRI scans showed that, indeed, there was none of the activity we associate with consciousness going on, yet they lived regular lives and had their own culture—though much of it was borrowed from surrounding peoples as the need arose. They were a people that neither possessed nor required consciousness. Just like the people of Martha’s Vineyard didn’t require speech. They were people in perfect harmony with a perfectly logical value system.”

“So Miach…”

“The conflict had spread into the mountains, plunging her people into chaos. Miach was taken from her village at the age of eight by Russian soldiers and sent to a camp run by human traffickers. This was a place of unspeakable tragedy, where sex slaves were kept for the sole use of the Russian army. This is where her consciousness awoke. Her brain needed a consciousness with a hyperbolic value system in order to withstand the daily, immediate terror of repeated rape. What happened was, a region in her cerebrum began to emulate the functions of the feedback mechanism usually handled by the midbrain. You’ve heard stories of how brains damaged in accidents will activate undamaged regions to take over some of the lost functionality, right? The brain is a very flexible organ.”

Miach’s consciousness was an emulation?

Not a true consciousness like our own.

Not a pattern woven by the feedback web in the midbrain.

A replica, created to serve a dire need.

Imitation consciousness.

I stared at my father’s back. He hadn’t brought Miach to Baghdad just because her despair had been deeper and more violent than mine.