Itoh, Project - Harmony

“What is it that you want?”

“What do we want? To build a new, post-chaos world. To bring an enduring harmony…”

There was something very disturbing about a group claiming they wanted peace when they had just plunged the world into darkness with a wave of suicides, and then, in the greatest act of terror in history, demanded the survivors kill each other.

“I don’t see a whole lot of harmony out there right now.”

“Things will settle down, as they must. This chaos is merely a step on the path toward peace. Miach Mihie has shown us the way. She is our prophet. She has a vision for mankind…the right path for us to take. You know her from when you were a child. You know that she can see what is yet to come.”

“So she had to make six thousand people try to kill themselves for this future?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not very convincing.” I grabbed him by the collar. “Where’s Miach?”

I could see blood seeping from Vashlov’s chest with every breath. He had lost a lot already. I must’ve hit a big artery or vein in there. Some of it was getting into his lungs, making it hard for him to breathe. His voice was a whisper, forced out through something that sounded just like I imagined a death rattle would sound.

“The suicides and the threats are just…the catalyst. Things are already in motion. But if you must know, Miach told me I could tell you where she was—but you have to promise to shoot me in the head if I tell you.”

Vashlov’s lips thinned and he formed a warped smile. For a moment, I hesitated.

A pleading look came into his eyes. “This really hurts. It hurts. Th-this is what pain feels like. WatchMe and medcare, you bastards, you sure did a fine job of keeping me in the dark about this sensation. Doesn’t that piss you off, Miss Kirie? Please…”

“Fine. Deal.”

I put the barrel of my gun to Vashlov’s forehead and pulled back the hammer. It clicked into place with a satisfying metallic sound and Vashlov breathed out with relief.

“Chechnya. Check with the Anti-Russian Freedom Front in Chechnya.”

“What, Miach is there ?”

“You’ll just have to go see for yourself.”

Vashlov nodded to signal he was ready.

Something about the way his eyes looked through me made my finger pause, motionless, on the trigger. Here, beneath the rapidly darkening Iraq sky, I was about to kill someone for the first time in my life. Right here, in this very moment. I was making the same decision that had been forced on billions of people across the world.

This would free me from having to make that choice in a few days, I realized. It felt like cheating. The guy was begging me to do it, and I would even be avenging my father’s death. You couldn’t make up a better rationale than that. I steadied my grip on the gun and felt intense self-loathing.

A thought occurred to me. Why had my brain developed this function it was expressing now? In what environment would self-loathing give me an evolutionary advantage?

I pulled the trigger.

//

01

The three of us were sitting on a rooftop, each with our own lunch. The contents of mine and Cian’s had both been decided by our mothers based on a range of choices provided them by a lifestyle pattern designer to ensure a perfect balance of nutritional control and modest tastes—so as not to overexcite our youthful minds with shameful flavors.

All our mothers had to do was make the food.

The flavors we needed were determined by a specially trained lifestyle pattern designer who could read our bodies’ preferences and predilections. The designer then ordered all the necessary ingredients online, coordinating with our household management software to make sure our diets stayed within budget.

The various facets of our lives were being divided into smaller and smaller sections. Outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing. When I was very small, I had the feeling that things weren’t quite so scattered. I was pretty sure I remembered my mom fretting about my age and height and weight and body fat percentage when I was around five years old. She would read charts, size me up, and come up with her own lunch recipes.

Miach’s lunch was nothing like ours. The recipes were incredibly simple, and more than two-thirds of her rather large lunch box would be filled with white rice and a big reddish-black lump in the middle of it that I think was probably an umeboshi pickled plum.

“Naoya Shiga used to say that the Japanese lost the war because they ate white rice,” Miach said, her cheeks full of white rice laced with sesame salt. A single grain of rice was stuck to her cheek.

“What war?”

“The Second World War. It was a fight between the two nations of America and Japan.”

“But didn’t both of them get divided up by the admedistrations?”

“Right, but this was back when America was still a country. Before the Maelstrom.”

“Um, Miach, that’s great, but you have rice on your face,” Cian broke in, giggling.

“Oh.” Miach found it with her index finger and plucked it off.

“Why do you eat so much all the time, Miach?”

“Because I like to eat. And if I don’t eat this much, my head doesn’t work right.”

I looked between my lunch and Miach’s. “You don’t have many things besides rice in there. It’s mostly all rice. And your lunch box is huge too.”

“Yet I’m skinny. Funny, isn’t it? The brown adipose tissue on my back did a number on my metabolism. I burn everything and none of the food gets to my brain. That’s why I have to shove so much of it in. If there was a speed-eating contest, I bet I’d win it.”

“What’s that?”

“These contests where people would try to see who could eat the most the fastest. The media channels used to show things like that, before the Maelstrom. It’s all shockingly unhealthy. The kind of thing those people in morality sessions love to bad-mouth.”

It sounded pretty horrible. I didn’t see how there could be any pleasure in damaging your stomach and intestines by eating so much. I sat down on the rooftop, looking down on city streets devoid of any shapes or colors that might prove too stimulating. “So, what do you tell your mom or dad what you want to eat for lunch?”

“I don’t. That is, I make my lunch myself. Of course my mom wants me to use this nosy lifestyle pattern designer or something. No thanks.”

“Doesn’t it reflect poorly on your mom’s SA score if her daughter doesn’t take her health advice?”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. I’m never really sure about those things. You know the old saying, ‘Kids grow up despite their parents.’”

“Yeah, but isn’t it a little different? I thought it went: ‘Even without parents, children will flourish.’”

“Yes, that’s the original. But there was this writer named Ango Sakaguchi, and he said that children would flourish without the useless baggage that is their parents. That’s a lot different than saying a kid’s going to grow up even without the benefit of parents. Of course, a lot of people have different ideas as to what constitutes flourishing.”

“Sakaguchi, huh? Sounds interesting.”

“You can download it from the Borgesnet. I recommend actually reading it—you know, with your eyes—instead of using the reader.”

So saying, Miach picked up a large lump of rice sprinkled with sesame salt and crammed it into her mouth. The sight of her chewing with both cheeks full was so comical I had to laugh.

“What?”

“Do you really have to cram it all in at once like that?”

“I’m just trying to match you guys. You have so much less that if I don’t eat quick, I’ll never keep up.”