Itoh, Project: Harmony

This text is a story written from the viewpoint of one of the Homo sapiens involved with these events.

This text has been tagged with etml 1.2. If you have compatible emotional textures installed in your texture reader, you will be able to reenact all of the emotions referred to in the text, as well as experience meta-functions at certain points as you make your way through. At present, the etml embedded in this text serves only as a trigger for you to reproduce the various emotional functions left behind in the brain. As humanity is perfectly socialized at present, there are few situations that call for any great display of emotion, either positive or negative.

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Let me tell you about what happened after the Caucasus.

Shortly after Tuan made her way down the mountain, the old folks decided to destroy consciousness and thereby equalize all members of society at once. Those elders with the authority went to their own rooms and entered their fragments of the code into their terminals. At that moment, the angels took up the hymn of Harmony and spread their wings before every person with WatchMe installed, all over the world.

When the angels’ wings touched the peoples’ heads, their consciousness and wills were gone.

In this new world, everything was self-evident, with nothing left to be chosen.

We are alive.

In a world where everything is as it should be.

No wondering, no choices, no decisions. Something very close to heaven.

The riots stopped immediately.

As though they had suddenly remembered what they were doing, everyone went back to their roles within the social system.The several billion people in the world with WatchMe installed had ceased being animals.

We finally arrived at the perfect social existence we had been heading toward in fits and starts since antiquity.

It was then that the sociology and economics studies of the previous age, when mankind had been partially animal, fell apart in the course of a night. When a perfectly purified and adapted man became the smallest unit of a social existence, sociology and economics transformed into pure logic.

On the surface, of course, nothing changed.

People cried as though they were sad and raged as though they were angry. But these actions carried the same value as the mimicked emotional responses a robot would have had in the previous era. All people had lost their inward minds.

Mankind was in perfect harmony with its medical industrial society.

The instant the old folks had entered their codes and the Harmony program had begun to sing, suicide disappeared from human society. Nearly all battles ceased. The individual was no longer a unit. The entire social system was the unit. By losing its sense of self and self-awareness, society had been freed from the pain it suffered because its systems had relied on imperfect humans, arriving for the first time at a perfect bliss.

I am a part of the system, as you are part of the system.

No one felt any pain about that any longer.

There was no “me” to feel pain.

I had been replaced by a single whole, by “society.”

The age when consciousness had been a valued facet of humanity was long past.

Though it is hard to estimate now, the age when “I” and “consciousness” and “will” had played an important role in making decisions was not a short one. For modern man, in perfect accordance with the system, there is no need for icons such as those the Homo sapiens called gods and heroes, yet there can be no harm in learning about these things.

Once there were two women named Miach Mihie and Tuan Kirie.

They were the last to pay their respects to our “selves.”

“Goodbye, me.

“Goodbye, soul.

“Though we may never meet again, goodbye.”

Those are the last words Tuan whispered, just before her WatchMe went online and nonconsciousness fell upon her. Words to put at ease several billion souls about to be lost.

Is there is a heaven on this earth?

If mankind can truly ever touch something perfect.

This is probably the closest thing to heaven we, as vertebrates patched together from a long string of evolutionary changes, can hope to achieve. To climb the ladder to a place where the self and society become one.

Now, we are happy.

So

so

happy.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With thanks to my parents and uncle and aunt, who

were there for me in my time of need.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Keikaku (Project) Itoh was born in Tokyo in 1974. He graduated from Musashino Art University. In 2007, he debuted with Gyakusatsu Kikan (Genocidal Organs) and took first prize in the “Best SF of 2007” in SF Magazine . He is also the author of Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots , a Japanese-language novel based on the popular video game series.

After a long battle with cancer, Itoh passed away in March 2009. Itoh revised Harmony while in the hospital receiving treatment for the disease.