Itoh, Project: Harmony

I frowned, still holding up my gun.

Wasn’t it you who hated that world? Wasn’t it you who denied it? You, Miach Mihie?

Ta-ta-tap.

“My father told me that you were—”

“That’s right, a person without a consciousness. Or you might say, someone who doesn’t require a consciousness. I should say I was a person without a consciousness, now that I’ve gone and gotten myself one. It was born here.”

Miach spread her arms and twirled like a ballerina, showing me the concrete cave.

Phweew, phweew, phweew.

The wind whipping across the heights of the Caucasus made a sad sound like a flute as it passed through the opening to the bunker.

Phweew, phweew, phweew.

“This was the base of operations for the Russian army’s prostitution ring. The girls they caught on the battlefield were raped here by the Russian soldiers every day.”

Phweew, phweew.

“One of the generals who raped me used to make me touch his antique Tokarev while he penetrated me again and again. This is a gun, he’d say, this is steel, this is power—like it was his second penis. He would stick it in my mouth and make me suck it, over and over and over.”

I was already crying.

And wondering what sort of consciousness it took to think about such things and say them so calmly, so brightly.

Phweew, phweew, phweew.

I put a hand to my mouth, holding back a wave of nausea.

“I had the gun in my mouth, was covering it with my own saliva, when my consciousness awoke. This concrete cave is filled with juices—semen, vaginal secretions, blood, tears, snot, and sweat. In that liquid I was born again.”

Ta-tap , ta-tap , ta-tap .

“In the end, some vigilantes and an MRS the Chechens had hired saved me. I was picked up by a Japanese adoption agency program seeking to counter the declining population problem, and came to Japan.”

“You told me,” I managed to say, my eyes and nose running. At some point I had lost the ability to keep my emotions dammed up inside me. “You told me you hated this world. The world of love-and-be-loved that tried to strangle you with kindness. But was it really so bad? Was it worse than Chechnya? Was our society a more terrible place than this bunker?”

“I didn’t know what to do,” Miach said.

Ta-ta-tap.

“When I was twelve years old, the boy living next door to me hanged himself.”

Ta-ta-tap, ta-ta-tap, ta-ta-tap.

“He said he hated this world, that he didn’t belong here, and he died. I thought about that. I knew how barbaric people could be. And I knew how broken they could become when they tried to repress that nature. I thought that this society, admedistrative society, this lifeist system was all wrong. A society that wanted me to regulate myself internally, even while people were killing themselves all around me, was just bizarre.”

It was true that Miach’s passion had given me and Cian a different view of the world and of a society based on the constant monitoring of the human body and health as a value above all others. A society where rigid self-monitoring was the only path to peace and harmony.

“That’s right, you hated the system of the world. That’s why when you asked us to die, me and Cian said yes.”

Something about the way I was speaking reminded me of how I talked back in high school. Like when I had been a little girl, eating my lunch with Miach Mihie and Cian Reikado.

“But I learned something when I left with your father, Tuan.”

“What?”

“That people can change. If people can break through the barrier of consciousness.”

Ta-ta-tap tap. Ta-ta-tap tap.

“So you didn’t cultivate this chaos because you hate the world,” I said, lowering my gun at last.

Miach continued her dance for an audience of one. “That’s right. I love it. I love it with all my being—and I want to affirm it. I want to cure the world of its infection, its ‘me’s and ‘I’s.” Miach looked serious. Her dance quickened. “I wrote most of the source code for the neural network your father and his friends installed into the midbrain of every WatchMe user in the world. There were backdoors in the WatchMe control systems of several admedistrations. Backdoors left for us. With such access, it was easy to create a hyperbolic desire for death in many people.”

All they had to do was reset the value of death as greater than the person’s will for life for the victim to choose oblivion. For those people who quite suddenly found death to be irresistibly attractive, a choice to make, there was no avoiding the erroneous value system’s effect.

“But the old folks got scared.”

“The ones running the Next-Gen group.”

“Yes, and your father was the ideologue at their center.”

“Ah yes. His proclamation that the creation of a perfect person for our society would make the soul a useless artifact. Funny, isn’t it?”

“I wasn’t laughing.” Miach stopped her dance and brought her hands together with a loud clap. I heard echoes run through the dark bunker. “I realized that’s what we had to do. There are tens of thousands of girls and boys killing themselves in the world right now. Adults too. We can never remove the barbarism of nature from ourselves completely. We can’t forget that before we are little admedistrative collectives, before we are part of a system or network of relationships, we are animals, plain and simple—a patchwork assortment of functions and logic and emotion all tied together into a bundle.”

“So you thought that if people were dying because they couldn’t get used to this world—”

“Yes. That we should give up being human in the first place.”

Ta-tap, ta-tap, ta-tap.

Miach resumed her light dance. “By which I mean, we should give up being conscious. We should give up our roughshod armor and become part of the society gnawing at our bones. We should give up being ourselves. Get rid of ‘me’ and consciousness and everything else our environment foisted on us. Only then can our society reach the harmony it was striving for.”

Ta-ta-ta-ta-tap, ta-tap, ta-tap-ta.

“They used to tell soldiers they weren’t supposed to wear boots to fit their bodies, they were supposed to fit their bodies into their boots. And we can do that, easily.”

“If the old folks would agree with you.”

Once again, Miach’s dance ceased. She let her shoulders fall with a sigh. “That’s right. The old folks think the end of consciousness is a kind of death. Even though there had been a minority living in the Caucasus mountains for thousands of years without anything like a consciousness. As long as a mature system is in place, there is no need for conscious decisions. We have a sufficiently mutually beneficial system, we have software to tell us how to live, we’ve outsourced everything possible, so what need have we of consciousness? The problem isn’t our consciousness, it’s the pain that our having a consciousness brings us when we are forced to regulate ourselves for health or for the community.”

“We don’t need a will, we don’t need consciousness. And how does this connect with the chaos in the world now?”

“It’s easy. If the world is teetering on the brink of destruction, the old folks will have no choice but to press the button.”

Of course. It was so simple.

“So you’re pushing them to a place where they’ll have to take our consciousnesses away?”

“That’s right.”

“You’ve engineered this whole situation, then?”

“That’s right. Technically speaking, it’s not an actual button. It’s a series of codes.”

Codes. A string of letters telling the world to be a certain way.